This is big news for video on the web. Today Adobe announced that we've added h.264 support to the Flash Player. There is a ton of information out there on the web this morning about this release (some good articles at Read Write Web, and Ryan Stewarts's ZDNet blog) . Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash Player team, has a great real world analysis about what this really means for video on the web.

What does this mean for the typical RIA developer? If you've been integrating audio and video into your application already, you can now use the h.264 codec as the format for that video. This is typically used in QuickTime video, and can output much higher quality video than you've had in the past. (Adobe will be supporting this video format in the upcoming Adobe Media Player, due out early next year.)

If you've been using QuickTime video in your RIA application, you no longer need to load an extra plugin for it. Flash Player will support that video natively. The team at Total Training was doing this - using QuickTime video inside their online training RIA. (I think they had all the video encoded in h.264 format already, and didn't want to convert it all to Flash video format.) This is going to allow them to create a unified experience for their online training application.

Some people are calling this a tipping point for Blue Ray and the h.264 HD format. (HD DVD uses a different format). That might be true. With ~ 90% penetration for Flash Player 9, in just 10 months since release, having Flash Player support the same HD format as BlueRay is huge.

For RIA developers though, this means just one thing - a better video experience inside your RIAs that are built with Flex or AIR. And that's good news for everyone.