Buckle up for cross- platform, go anywhere Audio and Video.
Whether you want 3G mobile phone delivery or high-definition broadcast, the most recent update to Adobe's ubiquitous, high-performance and lightweight Flash Player has you covered.

The update, codenamed ‘Moviestar', includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes for Windows, Macintosh and Linux versions of Flash Player 9, including:

• Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs.
• Multi-core support for vector rendering.
• Full screen mode with hardware scaling.
• Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework.
• Support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) in the Windows plug-in.

Heading for Hollywood with H.264
Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs has pushed Adobe Flash Player into the spotlight.

The H.264 codec is part of the MPEG-4 standard, and delivers outstanding video quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum: from 3G mobile phones to HD broadcast and everything in between.

Numerous broadcast, cable, videoconferencing and consumer electronics companies, including Apple, Sony, Nokia, SanDisk, Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft, consider H.264 the video codec of choice for their new products and services.

On the audio side, the AAC codec is a standard audio format defined in the MPEG-4 video standard. It's the default audio format of the Apple iPod, and the standard audio format for Sony's PlayStation 3. The Adobe Flash Player supports HE-AAC v2. HE-AAC v2 is an extension of AAC that uses Spectral Band Replication (SBR) and Parametric Stereo (PS) techniques to increase coding efficiency at low bitrates.

Pump up the AMP
Moviestar's updated audio and video support makes it ideal for inclusion in the upcoming Adobe Media Player (AMP). AMP is a state-of-the-art, cross-platform desktop media player developed using a combination of Adobe Flex and the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

AMP enables video publishers to deliver both streamed and downloaded Adobe Flash video content directly to the desktop of consumers. The product also addresses the evolving monetisation requirements of video and new media publishers by supporting in-application branding, advertising, content protection and syndication-based delivery.

To serve and protect
Understanding that content protection is an area of high importance to video publishers, Adobe is launching the Flash Media Rights Management Server (FMRMS) in early 2008. The FMRMS provides content integrity and identity-based licensing models for the delivery of Flash Video (FLV) content. This includes;

• User authentication before playback.
• Start and end dates of protected content.
• Number of days to cache in offline player (i.e. offline duration).
• List of approved playback applications.
• Playlist integrity.

Beyond the needs of publishers, the Adobe Media Player is designed to meet the expectations of consumers by providing high quality video playback, video aggregation and library management tools as well as new social features to facilitate content sharing. The Adobe Media Player is currently available as a free download from Adobe Labs, as Adobe are keen for users to try the software and comment on its development.

One billion Flash-enabled mobile devices by 2010
Adobe Flash Lite 3 allows mobile device manufacturers, operators and content providers to provide their users with the ability to watch Flash video (FLV) content on their mobile device. Publishers can choose local playback from the devices memory; HTTP playback from a web server; or streaming from a Flash Media Server.

Both Japan's NTT DoCoMo and Nokia are committed to delivering Adobe Flash Lite 3 enabled devices in upcoming releases of their handsets. With over 300 Million Adobe Flash enabled mobile devices and handsets shipped so far, Adobe expects more than one billion Flash enabled devices to be available by 2010.