Adobe releases Flash 10.2 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Emil

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Adobe has announced a beta release of Flash player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version is available on Adobe Labs.

Flash Player 10.2 beta introduces Stage Video, a new API that delivers high performance video playback across platforms, and IE9 hardware acceleration support previewed earlier in Flash Player Square. Hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline means Stage Video can deliver HD video with dramatically little processing power: "smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage," according to Adobe. The GPU offloads not only H.264 hardware decoding (introduced in Flash Player 10.1) but the rest of the video rendering pipeline, including color conversion, scaling, and blitting. Internet Explorer 9 GPU support means up to a 35 percent improvement in rendering performance.

The Flash Player 10.2 beta also features two popular requests from the community: support for full screen playback with multiple monitors and a native custom mouse cursors API. Users with multiple monitors will be able to watch videos in full screen on one display while multi-tasking on another. Support for native custom mouse cursors means developers will be able to create their own cursors, static or animated, and ask the native OS to render them rather than use resources to manually do so. Finally, the new beta release also includes new sub-pixel text rendering enhancements that leverage Adobe typography research to further enhance readability of text in Flash Player, especially for complex character-based languages.

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Glad to see Adobe doing something good. I think I will wait until the release before I try it though.
 
I like Adobe...You can't beat free software like flash. I do admit though that, I only really download it once, and that does enough for me...But yeah, keep up the good work Adobe.
 
Adobe better not make it a required update. Please let me decide when I can update flash player... I hate coming into work and having to update the entire building because it's required. Can't I just do it on the weekend when we're not open. Come on Adobe!
 
The Flash Player 10.2 beta also features two popular requests from the community: support for full screen playback with multiple monitors...
Heh, just a couple days ago I downloaded a modified ini file or something (I don't remember offhand) to allow it to be full screened on one monitor while using the other.
 
"The Flash Player 10.2 beta also features two popular requests from the community: support for full screen playback with multiple monitor"

This is the most important improvement to me. Thank god
 
Some test cases show little above 0% cpu usage with fullscreen video playback, when offloading to the gpu. Flash is improving at a breakneck speed now, I wonder how much of this is because Apple cut flash support. Whatever the reason, as an end user, I'm happy.
 
...I wonder how much of this is because Apple cut flash support. Whatever the reason, as an end user, I'm happy.

I see/hear statements like this a lot, it is incorrect.
Apple no longer ships Flash with their operating system on their computers. They did this because every OS update there would be news articles about how Apple shipped an OS that has a out-of-date/vulnerable version of Flash on it. So now, you just have to get Flash yourself, just like you would have to on Windows.
 
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