Adobe have announced the beta release of Flash player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Flash Player 10.2 beta introduces many new features and improvements including Stage Video, a new API which Adobe says will ‘help web sites deliver smooth, beautiful video across devices and browsers by enabling access to hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline.’
More from their PR spiel: –
“Flash Player 10.2 beta with Stage Video can deliver brilliant HD video with dramatically little processing power. Working together with hardware vendors has helped us take advantage of the GPU to offload 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.
More interestingly they go on to claim that hardware acceleration is so efficient in the beta that they’ve ‘seen laptops play smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage’.
Other changes/features in tow are: –
- enhanced text rendering
- native custom mouse cursors API
- support for full screen playback with multiple monitors
Download @ labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10. Usual caveats regarding beta software apply.