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The prospects of High Definition video on the web are looking up. The latest version of Adobe's Flash Player 9, the de facto standard in online video thanks to YouTube, includes support for the H.264 video standard — the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players.
HD already enjoys widespread support in many video editing applications. Heavyweights like Adobe Premiere and Apple's Final Cut Pro have long supported H.264, but even cheaper options like iMovie 07 support HD and can export H.264 video.
With the user supply chain already set to launch a new wave of HD content on the web, the only hang up is the video sharing sites themselves and the new Flash Player is poised to change that.
Today's announcement means, as Kevin Towes, product manager for Adobe Flash Media Server, says "the entire H.264 workflow is now solid from end to end."
Already professional sites like the Fox/NBC backed <a href="http://www.hulu.com/">Hulu</a> have announced they will support the new Flash Player and Hulu even has a sampling of movie trailers and clips in 720p HD available now.
Eric Feng, CTO of Hulu says that he's excited about the quality boost H.264 gives online video, "H.264 is a much more advanced codec, it offers better visuals, higher color saturation and hardware acceleration, which means we're going to be able to provide a much better viewing experience, especially in full screen mode."
Feng says the current HD gallery is just the beginning. Hulu plans to continue expanding its HD offerings as Flash Player 9's market saturation grows. Hulu is currently a private beta, though Feng says the site will open to the public in "a couple of months."
For user content oriented sites, the combination of cheaper HD cameras and the new Flash Player support mean that even your home movies may soon be viewable in HD glory.
Some popular web video sharing sites like <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a> already offer HD video through older formats, but with YouTube still the traffic leader in online video, HD in your browser won't really kick into high gear until YouTube offers H.264 movies.
YouTube was unable to respond in time for this story, but since H.264 is already the standard video format for the YouTube functionality on the iPhone and Apple TV, it might not be long before the same quality finds its way on to the web.
Should YouTube dally too long this could prove a chance for smaller sites to catch up to the web video leader. In addition to the Flash Player front-end, Adobe has released a new version of Flash Media Streaming Server 3. The streaming server supports H.264 encoded files and Adobe has slashed the price of the top end version by 90 percent.
While it's still too pricy for casual users, startup video sites can now offer video through the Flash Media Streaming Server for a mere $4500 instead of the previous price, often referred to as the "Flash Tax," of $45,000.
Kevin Towes argues that for smaller sites especially, the lower price barrier will help offset the increased bandwidth costs associated with HD content. "Bandwidth cost is huge, but H.264 offers the highest quality versus for the bandwidth and the new pricing structures will alleviate some of those costs."
But not everyone thinks HD is going to help user-generated sites. Gilles BianRosa CEO of <a href="http://www.vuze.com/">Vuze</a>, which has long offered professional HD content in a bittorrent-based client thinks the costs of streaming HD will far outstrip the value.
"We're happy about it," says BianRosa, "it shows what we've been saying for months, users want HD video." However, BianRosa doesn't think it's practical for sites like YouTube because the higher bandwidth costs of HD won't increase YouTube's ad revenue. "If you increase the pixels on a cat playing the piano that's not going to do anything for advertisers."
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