Adobe Launches Flash 10.2 with 'Stage Video'

Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) launched its Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux and features Stage Video, a full hardware accelerated video pipeline for beautiful video across platforms and browsers.

Stage Video lets websites take advantage of full hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline. This builds on the H.264 hardware accelerated decoding in Flash Player 10.1, Tom Nguyen, product manager for Flash Player, said in a blog post.

Stage Video hardware acceleration means that Flash Player can play even higher quality video while using dramatically less processing power, giving users a better experience, greater performance, and longer battery life, Nguyen said.

Flash Player using Stage Video can effortlessly play beautiful 1080p HD video with just 1-15 percent CPU usage on a common Mac or Windows computer.

In our testing across supported systems, we've found it's up to 34 times more efficient, Nguyen said.

Now, this is significant as Apple have been accusing the Flash platform for poor battery life of MacBooks.

Meanwhile, websites and content providers will first need to update their video players before users experience Stage Video playback with Flash Player 10.2 on their sites.

For developers, this typically means updating a SWF player file. SWF is a file format for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript in the Adobe Flash environment. Currently, SWF functions as the dominant format for displaying animated vector graphics on the Web. It may also be used for programs, commonly browser games, using ActionScript.

Since adoption of new Flash Player releases is accelerating, websites can expect that many of the over 1 billion people with Flash Player will be ready to benefit from Stage Video in Flash Player 10.2 soon, the blog post added.

Companies like Vimeo, Brightcove, Epix, and YouTube have already started work to enable support for Stage Video.

Adobe added that the latest version of Flash Player offers custom native mouse cursors that let designers and developers create their own static or animated cursors with silky smooth responsiveness, enabling richer game and application interfaces.

The latest version enable users to view content in full-screen mode on multiple monitors and provides enhanced sub-pixel rendering for superior text readability, especially for complex character-based languages.

In addition, Flash Player 10.2 offers better hardware acceleration in Internet Explorer 9, thereby improving graphics performance.