Adobe released a beta version update for Flash Player 9 with the following features:

1. Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs
2. Enhancements to full-screen mode to use hardware scaling for improved video performance and quality on systems running Windows 2000 and newer or Mac OS X 10.2 and newer.
3. Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs.
4. Higher quality and performance for downscaling large bitmaps (SWF 9 only).
5. Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes. This feature is enabled in the Flex 3 beta available on Adobe Labs.
6. Support for full-screen mode on Linux.

The big news, is of course, the ability to play back H.264, which is what everything is encoded in these days on the Apple side.

That is good news for those of you encoding to iTunes, which means that Flash users will now (well…once they update) be able to play your files too (without you having to encode multiple versions of the same file…one for iTunes….one for Flash).

However, so far, it is said that the player won’t play any HD resolution H.264 files.

Cheers!

- Marcelo Lewin

The Digital Media Dude

http://www.thedigitalmediadude.com/