Adobe fights back against Microsoft in the online video market with the support for H.264 video codec on its Flash Player. H.264 format will offer a HD quality video and it is based on open standards. The update will also support a superior AAC audio codec. Microsoft recently announced Microsoft Silverlight, a cross browser, cross platform plugin for delivering high quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac and Windows PCs. It is also tacitly supporting the original Mono team in their efforts to develop Linux support for Silverlight. Microsoft’s Silverlight platform received rave reviews from tech blogosphere and media. Everyone was predicting a complete shift in the online video watching experience. This announcement by Adobe is huge and it puts Adobe right back as the leader in the online video market. Flash Player 9 is used by 98.7 percentage of Internet users and many video sites favor flash over competing video players. With this support for high quality video standard, Adobe has brought high definition video to almost every internet user in this world. The update to Flash Player 9 will be available at Adobe Labs tonite. It will take a few months before content producers use this format extensively on their shows. Check out this post by Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, where he explains what this announcement means to end users and content publishers.

Update: Check out this great post by Tinic Uro on the topic.