Ted On Flash: Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1

Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1

DIGG IT! 10 Comments Published Sunday, June 10, 2007 at 9:22 PM .

The player team has been working long hours to add some amazing features into Flash Player 9. I would do a wild diservice to the work of the player team so I will defer to them directly.

Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1

Tinic Uro on Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1

Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1 - Emmy Huang

From Tinic's Post:

1. Mip map support for all bitmaps for Flash 9 or newer content. This improves the quality and rendering performance of downscaled bitmaps. Perfect for thumbnails and such. Even better, Papervision 3D content now automatically looks better and should be slightly faster when large textures are used.

2. Multi-threaded vector renderer. Now we take advantage of up to 4 Cores/CPUs for vector rendering.

3. Multi-threaded bitmap filters. Same as above but this applies to bitmap functionality specifically instead of the core vector rasterizer only.

4. Multi-threaded video decoding. The VP6 video codec will now run in a separate thread if a multi-core system is detected which leaves the main thread to do rendering and post processing of the video. With this true 1080p video is now possible on most modern dual core machines. Also, the responsiveness is improved with this change. The Sorenson codec on the other hand did not get this change for technical reasons.

5. Full-screen mode with hardware scaling. Probably the biggest new feature in the Flash Player Update 3. This leverages DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on OSX. There is an new API to control the behavior which was required since we could not change current behavior and we wanted to give the maximum flexibility possible. I know you are probably eager to use this feature, we will post more information on this on labs.adobe.com soon. I'll also will give you much more technical details in an upcoming blog post.

6. Less tearing in the new full screen mode. We now have some code which will try to do VBL syncing. It's still a work in progress but we hope we can fix the remaining issues.

7. Going into full screen mode has a zoom transition effect. The beta does not work perfectly right now, but we want to get feedback if this is acceptable to end users. We will not expose an API to access/control this, either we'll leave it in and fix the remaining bugs or it is out. Also you might notice that this even affects the current full screen mode, something we will remove in the final release.

8. The Linux plugin now uses the XEmbed protocol. This is work in progress. The downside is that konqueror and Opera do not support this right now, so the Flash plugin will not work until these vendors update their plugin support. Also we are seeing decreased performance because GTK lacks somewhat in the the basic graphics API department. I'll explain in a later post.

9. Tons of performance tweaks and bug fixes. Looking the the current bug database statistic we fixed 371 bugs since 9.0.r45. Fixed really means fixed, it does not include duplicates, unreproducible bugs etc.

Lead with Grenades, Way to go Player Team! That team is real rocket science.

Ted :)

10 Responses to “Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1”

# zachg June 10, 2007 9:49 PM

I just noticed the zoom effect on YouTube with the new player, looks very cool.
I'd much prefer an API to customize a transition though, especially if the full screen view has its own UI and the app handles re-positioning and scaling.
Playing around with it I do see some bugs, mostly with rendering after going back to normal mode.
# arpit June 10, 2007 9:54 PM

wooo hooo. Sounds awesome (especially the multithreading stuff). Great job !!
# emmy June 10, 2007 10:11 PM

@zachg

Are you on a mac? That is a known issue listed in the release notes (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/releasenotes.html).

best,
emmy
# Anonymous June 10, 2007 10:48 PM

as borat would say ... veerryy nice.
# zachg June 10, 2007 11:40 PM

@emmy

yep. thanks for pointing that out!
# Ryan Guill June 11, 2007 7:07 AM

Can I just get confirmation from what I think I understand from your post last thursday, that this new version of the flash player is not *required* to view moxie content?
# Ted Patrick June 11, 2007 10:59 AM

Ryan,

You can view Moxie content in any Flash Player 9 release player.

Ted
# Daniel June 14, 2007 5:26 AM

Does this version already include the caching feature for assets (e.g. the Flex framework)?
# Anonymous July 26, 2007 7:08 AM

Well Adobe be releasing an update to Flash CS3 to allow the "fullScreenSourceRect" attribute of the stage object to work in ActionScript 3.0?

The new playerglobal.swc file provided in the FullScreen HW article on Adobe Labs doesn't appear to work at all.
# Anonymous February 12, 2008 5:45 AM

Flash and Flex are great, but why adobe can't see great potencial of mobile devices... there is no support for flex components in flash lite 3 jet... just some fancy codecs...

Igor

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Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1

10 Responses to “Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1”

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