This week media reigned supreme as both Microsoft and Adobe made announcements at the International Broadcasting Convention. In addition AIR announces a new version and some intriguing statistics, Tim Heuer discusses the Silverlight installation process, and some new Chrome resources have been released. All this and more on the weekly RIA Roundup from InsideRIA.

FEATURED: Silverlight to Support H.264 and AAC

Microsoft demonstrated the upcoming h.264 support for Silverlight at the IBC conference this week. Microsoft has played an active role in the h.264 video standard, so it was a logical move for Silverlight to adopt the h.264 video standard in addition to it's current video offerings.

This also means that both Flash and Silverlight will support the h.264 standard. This should be of interest to developers, and other platforms as well. With the two major players supporting it, is there room for a new different cross-platform codec like the one being developed for JavaFX?

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): H.264 and AAC support coming to Silverlight

Scott Guthrie (Microsoft): Silverlight Shines at International Broadcasting Conference 2008 in Amsterdam

AIR Statistics and the Next Version of AIR

Ryan Stewart announced that there has been over 25 Million installations of AIR applications, and the SDK used for creating AIR applications has been downloaded over 850,000 times. This shows how far the AIR platform has progressed since it's release. AIR is now a platform that must be taken seriously. While not as ubiquitous as Acrobat Reader or the Flash Player, it isn't nearly as far behind as many thought it was.

Ryan Stewart (Adobe): Birth of a Platform: 25 Million AIR Application Installs and 850k SDK Downloads

Adobe: Adobe AIR Application Installations Surpass 25 Million

In addition, Mike Chambers announced that the next version of AIR ("Cosmo") is now available in the nightly SDK builds for Flex. This includes the tools needed to develop and test applications (adl and adt), but it does not contain the runtime installer.

Mike Chambers (Adobe): Adobe AIR 1.5 (”Cosmo”) builds now in Flex SDK Nightly builds

AMF Support in the Zend Framework

Wade Arnold gave the first demo of the upcoming AMF support that will be baked into the Zend Framework. This screencast shows the PHP code as well as the Flex code to get it to work.

Wade Arnold: Zend Amf w/ RemoteObject video

Tim Heuer on the Silverlight Installation Experience

Tim Heuer addressed some of the people commenting that the Silverlight installation process is too complicated. Tim runs through the different installation experiences that are available to developers for Silverlight, and he also addresses some of the specific comments.

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): Silverlight install experience too hard?

Adobe Open-Sources Mobile Content Delivery Protocol

The technology formerly called the FlashCast protocol, has now been open sourced by Adobe as a part of the Open Screen Project. Here is a description of the protocol:

"This communication protocol describes a mechanism for data to be synchronized between mobile phones and a network-based server in an efficient, mobile network-friendly manner."

This is yet another high profile technology that Adobe has open sourced within the last year.

Open at Adobe: There's something happening here

Mobile Content Delivery Protocol

Chrome Resources

Web Worker Daily listed a few resources for Google's new browser, Chrome. In addition Ajaxian highlighted the UA profiler that takes a programmatic look at browser features - and produces a ranking of Chrome against other browsers. Both posts give great information to anyone interested in Chrome.

Web Worker Daily: Google's Chrome Browser: Resources Showing Up

Ajaxian: UA Profiler: Automatically testing browser features

Adobe Announces Encoding Server

Adobe announced a new resource for Flash video at IBC: the Flash Media Encoding Server. This server will allow a wide range of video formats to be converted into Flash video. This is slated to be made available to the public in late 2008.

FlashComGuru: Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server Announced

Adobe: Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server Debuts at IBC2008

Read more from David Tucker.