Niall Kennedy has the news on all sorts of goodies in the beta version of Flash Player:

Yesterday Adobe released a beta version of its Flash Player browser plugin capable of decoding H.264 video, AAC audio, and associated rich metadata. Web browsers utilizing Flash 9.0.60.184 or higher will now be able to playback content encoded for digital television, iPods, and high-end mobile phones using international standards. Adobe's support for these standardized audio and video codes will streamline the production process for desktop and web video, hopefully reducing time-to-market and opening more video catalogs to online viewers. A beta version of the new player, Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2 "Moviestar", is available from Adobe Labs.

I'm hoping this means we can just encode for H.264 (aka MPEG4) and have it play with Flash player widgets, without having to do "FLV" anymore.

Flash Player now supports 3GPP time text tracks, iTunes metadata ("ilst" atom), and chapter listings for easy-to-navigate playback and searchability. Flash developers will need to listen for and handle each format but publishers may choose to output a full transcript or keyword markers with every video.

I.e. not only can we play H.264, we can write neat Flash interfaces that let us hop to the part we're interested in, places where so-and-so appears in the video and so on. Coolio.