The best places to keep up on all this is StreamingMedia or Jan Ozer's site
Streaming Media
http://www.streamingmedia.com/
Jan Ozer
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/
The reason why there's no definitive book is that significant changes often occur over months. Any book written would probably be outdated by the time it's printed. Certainly fundamentals don't change as quickly but things like HTML5 and the battle over H.264 vs Ogg can move very quickly.
H.264 is MPEG Part10. It's a codec. extensions such as .mov, .mp4, etc are containers. There can be significant differences on how a codec is handled depending on the container (aka wrapper).
Silverlight and Flash are extension agnostic when it comes to H.264.
Quicktime will handle mov, mp4, m4v for example but if it were f4v you'd probably need the Perian Quicktime plugin.
There's also things to learn about such as "Levels" and "Profiles" and when and why to use them and with H.264, why there's several variants like Apple's, MainConcept, Dicas, x264, MAX and others. There's also reasons to put H.264 in Transport Streams for example.
I really don't know of any quick read on all the above. Jan Ozer's site is a good place to learn. Since it's a site and note a "book" he updates it frequently as things change or as there's a reason to explain something another way.