We announced today that we’re releasing an update for Flash Player that will support the H.264 codec that has become almost a de facto standard for video content. What’s great is that this will also go into the Adobe AIR beta 2 release that we’ll be dropping at MAX later this year. That means you’ll be able to play most H.264 content right inside your AIR application.

Tinic Uro has a great post about what the new functionality means. As a developer you use the exact same APIs that you use right now to stream and display FLV. As Tinic notes, you can even put H.264 streams into an FLV but you have to make sure the sequence headers are handled correctly. The AAC support is also really neat because you can do native AAC playback and you use the same NetStream API that you use to connect to video so the sound and video APIs sync up a bit now which I think will be helpful going forward. As Tinic says, “We are now getting into a situation where there is not much difference between audio and video files anymore. “.

One application which will gain a ton from this is the Adobe Media Player (AMP). Because you can load .mov, .mp4, m4v, .m4a, and .3gp files directly into both the browser based player and Adobe AIR, you’ll be able to distribute all of your H.264 encoded media to users of AMP. With all of the H.264 media out there (and remember Europe is standardizing TV around H.264) you’ll have a ton of content at your disposal as an AMP user. With H.264 and AAC, Adobe AIR is going to be a fantastic media platform for you to build on.

So by now you’ve (hopefully) been checking out Adobe AIR and you’ve built a couple of sample applications. We want you to take it to the next level so we’re holding the Adobe AIR Developer Derby. The goal is to build the most unique Adobe AIR application and the grand prize is a travel gift certificate worth $100,000 that you can use wherever you want.

There are five categories which also have a single winner who walks away with one of the coolest developer setups ever:

• A Mac Pro 8Core with 4 gigs ram, 1.5 TB (2×750GB) of storage.
• (2) Dell 2707WFP 27″ widescreen monitors.
• (1) one Sony Playstation 3.
• (1) $200 gift certificate to Amazon.com.
• (1) Herman Miller Aeron chair.
• (1) Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones.
• (1) copy of Adobe Flex™ Builder™ version 3, Macintosh edition.
• (1) copy of Adobe Creative Suite® 3 Master Collection for Macintosh.
• And one squishy stress ball.

We’ve got categories for best Business Application (with both a HTML and Flash winner), best Community Application (with a winner for both HTML and Flash) and finally one Wild Card winner which doesn’t fit into one of the two groups above but is still done in AIR and worthy of a prize. Check out the contest page and official rules for more info. The deadline is September 5th at 11:59 PM Pacific Time so start coding!

During the bus tour we had Dion Almaer, Andre Charland, and Kevin Hoyt in the back of the bus together so I took a chance to ask them a few questions about where AIR fits in the Ajax world. There is some great stuff in the video and we had a lot of these kinds of conversations on the bus. This was one of the few we got on video, but hopefully we’ll have more of that on the second leg. I apologize about the bounce - it’s hard to do camera on a moving bus.

I attended OSCON and because we’ve open sourced Flex, that was the focus for most of the conversations. But I also talked to people about Adobe AIR and a lot of them seemed surprised at just how closely Adobe AIR is tied to open source. The runtime itself isn’t open source, but we’re making use of a lot of open source projects and contributing to some of those projects:

• • -Tamarin - this is the virtual machine in the Flash Player that we open sourced under the Mozilla tri license.
  • -Webkit - We’re using Webkit as our HTML renderer in Adobe AIR and we’re hoping to contribute back to the project as we fix and implement things.
  • -Flex - While not technically a part of Adobe AIR, it’s one of the ways to build AIR applications and like Ajax, it’s an open source technology.

Adobe AIR is all about appealing to web developers. AIR is intended to let you take your web development skills and build engaging desktop experiences. If you want to do that using as many open source, standards-based technologies as possible, Adobe AIR fills the need with Webkit and our HTML/Ajax stack. We’re always looking for open source feedback, so feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email.

Mike Chambers just posted some information on our second leg of the on AIR Bus tour. We’re going to be starting the East Coast leg on August 14th with the event in Atlanta. We all had a great time on the first leg and we got some great feedback about the event. Now that we’re rested up a bit I think all of us are looking forward to the trip.

We’ve got some new sessions also which I think people will be interested in. Ben Forta is going to join us and talk about ColdFusion powered AIR applications and Chafic Kazoun is going to speak on building Flex components. Luckily we also got Christian Cantrell to come along and he’s going to talk about the Embedded Database API which is one of my favorite things that’s in AIR.

All the events are still free, so find the city closest to you and register. Hope to see you there!