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The update for Flash Player 9, codenamed Moviestar, now includes support for H.264, the video compression part of the MPEG-4 standard. It's the same standard used in both Blu-ray and HD-DVD video.

The upgrade will allow the Adobe software to deliver high-defintion television and video services over the web, providing recipients have sufficient bandwidth to cope with the streams.

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The upgrade brings Flash back in line with Microsoft's fledgling Silverlight technology, which is also capable of streaming high definition video over the internet.

"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," says John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. "Already a broadly adopted industry standard, the inclusion of the H.264 codec in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, the Creative Suite product line, and the upcoming Adobe Media Player will accelerate customer workflows, enabling the creation and repurpose of high-quality web video content without extra development costs."

The beta version of the upgrade should be available for download later today from Adobe's beta site.