Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds.

Some video sharing sites already started implementing the player including Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/highdef)

Event highlights include:

• 50 + presentations and panels
• Presentations from Adobe, bigspaceship.com (Joshua Hirsch), Blitz (Ivan Todorov), Hello Design (David Lai) Trailer Park (Marcelo Guerra and Jason Seigler) and others
• Pre-festival workshops
• Free ‘Get A Job’ evening event
• Parties and other networking opportunities

For event details, go to http://www.fitc.ca/hollywood, and enter "hotshop20" to get 20% off

As expected, at the Adobe Max Event in Chicago, Adobe launched a Beta 2 release of their AIR application, along  with many good looking AIR apps including:

• Adobe Media Player - a slick online/offline Flash video player
• eBay Destkop - the long awaited "San Dimas" eBay Desktop app

and more here