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Introducing Flash Player 9 Update 3

Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 introduces many features that provide new capabilities for any type of SWF content creator, including enhancements for developers, designers, and video professionals. To find out what you can do with this latest version (9,0,115,0), first read this overview and then take a look at the Flash Player 9 demo to see specific features in action.

H.264 and high-efficiency AAC support

Using the same APIs that you would use to load Sorenson or On2 VP6 video content, you can now load H.264 video in MPEG-4 format. This means that you can take advantage of the numerous tools and technologies around H.264 without even having to recompile your SWF.

Flash Player can play back a subset of MPEG-4 movies containing H.264 content, including baseline, main, and high profiles. What this means is that you can take existing movies like 3GP, MP4, and MOV files and play them back in your SWF content. For example, you can use many video podcasts and videos recorded from your mobile phone on the web in Flash Player.

In addition to supporting more content than ever before, Flash Player gives content developers access to a large ecosystem through the common H.264 standard. Many tools already export for H.264 video, including Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro, and there's a large community of video professionals already experienced with this codec.

Flash Player will continue to work with Sorenson and On2 video. Each of the supported codecs has its own strengths that make it the best choice for certain projects.

Graphical rendering enhancements

Flash Player 9 Update 3 has several improvements designed to make drawing pixels to the screen faster and better than ever before. The various techniques include hardware acceleration, multicore CPU support, and some new image adjustment features to improve image quality.

Full-screen support was introduced in the November 2006 dot release of Flash Player 9 (9,0,28,0). Based on the release timing, it should already have reached around 80% penetration. Flash Player 9 Update 3 adds new APIs to make full-screen more flexible and new capabilities to make even your high-definition videos play back with even better quality and performance in full screen!

To take advantage of these hardware scaling features, you specify a rectangle and then enter full-screen as normal. Flash Player takes the pixels in the rectangle and uses hardware acceleration to scale the image up to the size of the screen.

While in normal mode, rendering continues to be done by your computer's main processor. However, Flash Player can now take advantage of up to four CPUs/cores for graphics while ActionScript execution remains on your first processor. Bitmaps, filters, vectors, and video can now be split across the processors to make playback more efficient.

Regardless of the number of processors your computer has, you can enable other enhancements such as improved image downscaling. This feature resamples images when they are scaled down by 50% or more. This increases image display efficiency as well as accuracy for better-looking scaled images.

Flash Player cache

Certain components and elements created by Adobe are used by a large number of websites. The most significant of these is the Flex framework. More than 100K of identical data has to be downloaded for every Flex application. With the new Flash Player cache, Flex applications will download and start up much faster because users will have already downloaded the framework from one site and will not need to download it again—even when accessing Flex applications on other websites.

The Flash Player cache is separate from the browser's cache. It works by storing the contents of a new type of file (SWZ) on your hard drive. When a website makes a request for the SWZ file from the server, Flash Player first checks to see whether it has the matching file already in the cache before attempting to download it.

The Flash Player cache improves the end-user experience because Flex sites will now download much faster. This feature is also beneficial to the application host by reducing bandwidth.

Cross-platform parity

The Flash Player 9 Update 3 release also adds functionality to specific plug-ins to add support for some features that have not been available in the past.

Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) support has been added to the PC plug-in to provide accessibility support across all PC installations of Flash Player on a per-object basis. These features continue to work in the same way as they do in the ActiveX control. There are no changes to the APIs.

For Linux users, full-screen APIs are now available and include the new hardware-scaling features described previously.

Where to go from here

Be sure to read David Hassoun's article, Exploring Flash Player support for high-definition H.264 video and AAC audio, for detailed tutorials about incorporating MPEG-4 video and HE-AAC audio content and associated metadata into your projects for playback in Flash Player 9 Update 3.

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