Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 betas are out, multi-touch and video acceleration are in (video)
By Thomas Ricker 
posted November 17th 2009 3:25AM
posted November 17th 2009 3:25AM
Here we go: Adobe just made its Flash 10.1 prerelease packages available for download in fulfillment of its Open Screen promise. The download is available for Windows, Intel-based Mac, and Linux systems with a smartphone version coming later; notably, while no other mobile OS is specifically mentioned, Adobe says that a beta for Palm webOS is slated for "later this year" on its Flash Player 10.1 page. At the moment, however, only the Windows release includes hardware-based video acceleration for H.264 video. And this is beta-ware kids, so there's more than the usual level of hazard with installing. Update: As noted by reader ZeroK2 in the comments, the release notes [warning: PDF] specify which GPUs will benefit from the hardware acceleration. These include ATI Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx series, Mobile Radeon HD 4xxx series, select FirePro products, Intel 4 series chipsets, the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder, and most NVIDIA ION and GeForce 8/9/1xx/2xx powered PCs. In other words, the vast majority of netbook owners with integrated GMA950 graphics need not apply.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
I am really really eager for flash on WebOS. While not a big fan of flash it will be very nice to have access to it, it tends to get everywhere afterall
N900 Maemo will get it way faster than any other OS, you should see the demo .. it was butter smooth thanks to the dedicated GPU.. I dont think snapdragon has one
@Satz
I don't know how many times I have to repeat myself on this site:
The Snapdragon platform does have a GPU (Imageon Z430), and it's more powerful than the SGX530 in the OMAP3 platform, and only slightly less powerful than the SGX535+ in the iPhone 3GS, it has full OpenGL ES 2.0 support, and all the other important stuff.
Just an example of it's power, Soutend developed a game specifically for the Snapdragon platform, Electopia:
http://southend.se/games/electopia/index.php
Now, a bit more on-topic:
I want Flash to die as quickly as possible, but it's good to see that they're at least trying to improve it.
Does anyone know if the gma 500 is planned to be supported? The palm pre and gma 500 both use the powervr sgx graphics processor which has h.264 acceleration.
does it support microsoft's Smooth Streaming?
youtube needs smooth streaming.... :(
the last thing we need is youtube to be dependent on some proprietary technology controlled by microsoft.
vs being dependent on a proprietary format from Adobe? Only reason YouTube went with Flash was because pretty much everyone and their mothers have that plug-in. Silverlight barely existed at the time.
adobe releases linux, mac and windows binary at the same time.
@Kimleng
Adobe may be a third party, but unlike Microsoft, they are a neutral third party. It is in their best interest to have flash working on as many platforms and for as many purposes as possible. And the more stuff Flash works on, the more valuable it gets.
Smooth Streaming is not fixed to Silverlight though.
It's a media protocol, so it can be implemented on any software platform. although silverlight's the only one that supports that at the moment.
there's even a free (creative commons license) server that can be installed on non-IIS web servers, eg Apache. http://smoothstreaming.code-shop.com/
i think....
I just tried it and I saw quite a bit of graphical lags and the image was grained a bit, it did not improve my performance, it the contrary my cpu utilization on 1080p youtube went from 35% on 10.0 to 45% on 10.1. I see however how this can be a better approach just don't expect any real quality or performance increases immediately.
Flash had dynamic streaming way before smooth streaming which is practically the same thing
yay. finally have youtube stream HQ on my hp mini 311 without the lag
Aww, no hardware acceleration for OSX yet? The OSX version of Flash is the one that needs it the most. (Though this version already does seem a lot snappier).
Please see my comment below why the h264 GPU accelerator support wouldn't make a big difference yet on Mac.
i'd love to be able to play HD videos off my EeePC. hell i'd settle for being able to stream Hulu videos! i'll have to check it out.
Apple. Please let the iPhone have Flash. Please.
Don't you realise? Apple are no more likely to listen to you than they are to the developers that they alienate with their ridiculous approval process for apps etc.
Good improvements on the Flash Adobe, but I am actually kinda shocked that your mobile platform isnt as big as it should be.. or am i missing something?
you are... 10.1 mobile runs on pretty much all phone platforms (or will once it is released). Only omission I noticed during the keynote at MAX was Apple.
Wait can i download it fir my droid?
Does this mean my MacBook won't melt when watching HD youtube video's or have they still not bothered to actually code a proper OS X version of flash yet?
Only if it's an Intel Mac, it seems.
This is Adobe we're talking about, dude. The answer is self-evident.
The big advantage of the 10.1 version would be h.264 GPU acceleration. Unfortunately the Flash player needs a video driver that supports this. Currently, on the Mac the only driver that supports this is for the 9400M and it seems unlikely Apple will release drivers for the older video cards/chips they supplied in the past (such as the 8600/8800/etc which have h264 acceleration).
Perhaps owners of such cards (including myself) can ask Nvidia nicely for new drivers..?
(I expect Linux users will have similar problems with the h264 acceleration support)
PS the current Mac version of Flash (that is the 10.1 beta version) does not yet support the 9400M h.264 accelerator either..
Anyone know of any multi-touch capable demos on Flash? I've got this installed on my Win 7 tablet with a multi-touch N-trig digitizer, but I don't know of anywhere to actually try it.
This is really cool but there is this little video site (called youtube) that doesn't work with it. I've tried it on Win 7 x64 + IE (and I'm really glad I didn't install the non active-x version).
Not true. It works perfectly in youtube. You need a compatible video card however and the latest video card drivers. Check the release notes for yours.
It allowed my weak CULV processor laptop with intel GMA graphics to play the 1080p video of the dog flawlessly! Before it was literally a slideshow.
Here is the 1080p clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUM1284TqFc&fmt=37
tested on windows vista 64bit with firefox 3.5.5
The Flash plugin for OSX must be the worst piece of shit ever developed.
The release notes state what GPU's are supported under Windows for assisted decoding
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf
I'l summarize
ATI Radeon 4000 series
ATI Radeon 3000 series
ATI FirePro (selected models)
Intel series 4 chipset likely they mean the GMA 4xxx line.
Broadcom Crystal HD decoder is also supported.
Nvidia GeForce most of the 8/9/1xx/2xx series are supported but not all.
Good point.
I think the article is misleading in stating that "for those of you with Atom-based netbooks brought to their knees by full-screen HD video, well, the benefits likely outweigh the risk for you".
ION-powered netbooks will get hardware accelerations. Older ones (with Intel GMA 950 chipset) will see no difference.
Anand put up a benchmark on anadtech.com and he found little to no improvmenet using AMD GPUs either.
This is really only useful for ION.
That may be what's in the release notes, but I have a PCIe Radeon HD2400, pretty low end, and I saw a pretty significant boost when I installed the update.
I posted before I saw the tips. Thanks added -- Thomas
It was supposed to bring support for 64 bit browsers yet i cannot get the activex version to install, keeps crashing :S
Same here I can't install the activex. It crashes once it reaches 100%. WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit.
I installed the active-x version on Win 7 x64. When I load youtube in IE x64 it tells me that I should install flash on my PC. It kinda works in IE x86, but it's really buggy (it might be my display drivers though: 8400m GS, driver 186.81 WHQL
fez, i don't think there was any mention that a 64bit version of flash 10.1 was coming out.
On Windows Vista 64 bit with firefox 3.5 the plug in installed perfectly and its a HUGE improvement.
Sorry I should clarify, its the normal firefox browser running on 64bit windows.
Well, I've installed it on the machine I use as an HTPC - while housing a reasonable Athlon 64 X2 and a Radeon 2600, it previously choked on HD flash video. Now everything is smooth as butter, finally ! Tried HD on Hulu, 720P & 1080P on YouTube... Looks fantastic. About time !
@MarcO little bit late, but how you have done this? i can check in the settings the flash should use gpu acceleration but it seems that it does NOTHING (i think cpu usage goes even higher).
i have also an hd 2600 (mobility)
My Macbook Pro is now running flash at 22% of CPU % vs. 75%. Wow, this was a long time coming!!
64-bit Flash player yet? Oh who am I kidding.
Get your priorities straight, browsers should get there first. What's up with the nonsense flash hating?
By the way Adobe just upped their game. Video Acceleration will change everything you thought you knew about flash.
Tohe, I can't tell if you're sarcastic or not, but if not...
...64bit processors/OS have been available for years now. A company of the size of Adobe really should be capable of offering a 64bit version of one of their most popular products after all that time.
And "upped their game" by implementing something that SHOULD have been there 5 years ago? You gotta be kidding.
I think his point is that there are few x64 versions of major browsers out.
Chrome 64-bit is only available for Linux
Firefox 64 bit is more of a side project, not a major release from Mozilla. Apparently they may be plans to have a major release of a 64-bit version when 4.0 comes out.
Safari is only 64 bit in Snow Leopard
Internet Explorer is the only major release 64 bit browser for Windows, that I know of.
Adobe is one of the main culprits of holding 64-bit back altogether. A 64-bit Photoshop\CS Suite should have been out years ago. An industry standard app, that would certainly benefit from 64-bit processing and memory addressing, who's users can mostly afford to pay for the hardware, and they drag their feet until 2009. 64-bit Flash might not even make it out next year.
FYI: Photoshop CS4 is 64-bit, but only in Windows. After-effects is also largely 64-bit.