Adobe Releases Final Version of Flash Player 10
In a one-two punch, both Microsoft and Adobe announced updates to their respective web media platforms. On Monday, as noted in a previous article, Microsoft released Silverlight 2 as an automatic upgrade for those who have Silverlight 1 or the beta of Silverlight 2 on their machines. Adobe, in turn, released Flash Player 10 today.
Adobe announced today the immediate availability of both Flash Player 10 and Creative Suite 4 on Windows, Mac, and Linux. During a pre-briefing, Adobe senior product marketing manager for Flash Tom Barclay mentioned several key elements of Flash Player 10.
"We spent a lot of time in this release working on expressive capabilities," said Barclay, "including cinematic effects on the web, enabling 3D effects using rotation/animation on 2D objects, and updated drawing tools."
For streaming delivery and high-end content, several additional features stand out. Adobe is taking what it dubs as the "world’s most pervasive application runtime" and adding a way to use custom filters, based on the Pixel Bender technology used in After Effects, to add custom filters at runtime.
"These custom filters, which are user-generated, can be applied to content during production," said Barclay. "Once the content creator sees how they will respond, the effect can be applied without rendering, via a just-in-time (JIT) compiler at run-time.
In some ways, this brings Flash Player 10 into the realm that the MPEG-4 System was designed to handle—multiple streams of content, including still 2D content, that appeared to be in motion thanks to client-side rendering. Custom filters can be as simple as motion blur and as complex as surround sound. Based on the fact that all sound information is also available at a binary level, this means sound information can be turned into visualizers and sound calculations can be used to create a client-side audio mixer.
In addition, the graphics processor unit (GPU) acceleration that was begun in Adobe Flash Player 9 version 3 is being built upon by applying the API to local filters or device-based fonts, performing calculations and filters (or anti-aliasing for text) using the processing power of the local machine.
"Using API can limit amount of code that's going to be written," said Barclay, "and any filter used would either be included in the application—embedded in the SWF—or would use File Reference via a link to an external filter."
File Reference is an Adobe technology that allows the Player to reference content at runtime from the local machine, without requiring it to first be uploaded to the server, and then downloaded again to the local machine.
"The InDesign team created the new text engine," said Barclay. "It includes advanced text layouts such right to left, columns, vertically oriented content, and multiple graphical languages such as Chinese or Korean. The low-level API allows for creation of additional tools—like text on a path—that aren't available in the core system."
On the video side, Flash Player 10 is being touted for GPU acceleration beyond H.264. Adobe says the GPU acceleration will also allow for compositing and high-res screen renders. And, like Microsoft's adaptive streaming, Flash Player 10 will work with an upcoming version of Flash Media Server that will include the ability to do multi-bitrate streaming.
"The quality of our video is every bit as good," said Barclay, when asked to compare to Silverlight 2. "We go up to 1080p and a number of customers are doing high bitrate streaming, such as Disney, up to 10-15Mbps per second. In addition, the size of our player download is less than half of Silverlight's size, given the fact that they're including the .NET framework in the download. We've chosen a slightly different route, where the Flash SDK can be downloaded once it's needed, and held in a cache, so it stays in place persistently on the client machine after the first request."