The H.264 standard video support is the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. Also the updated player includes High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support, as well as hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback.

“Adobe is committed to providing a seamless creation-to-playback solution that allows creatives and developers to produce video and rich-media once, and then deploy that content across the widest array of distribution and playback environments,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of creative solutions at Adobe.

Also, according to Mark Randall, chief strategist for dynamic media at Adobe, Flash Player 9 will take advantage of hardware acceleration in most PCs' graphics cards and is optimised for dual-core processors.

The player will also support HE-AAC version 2, a more efficient audio compression standard, according to Randall.

H.264 encoding is already available in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects software, and it will be supported by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and applications developed with Adobe AIR software, including Adobe Media Player. Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system application runtime that enables developers to use their existing skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

The public beta version of the update to Adobe Flash Player 9 software, code-named Moviestar, which includes H.264 and HE-AAC functionality, will be available as a free download from Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com. The final release is expected to be available via update in the fall.

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled its Silverlight platform which is considered to be a direct rival to Adobe’s Flash technology.