Flash Player 10.1 Features and Enhancements

Support for New Platforms

Flash Player 10.1 is now available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. Supported mobile device operating systems include: Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm webOS , and Symbian S60. This release also supports Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) desktop operating systems.

The consistent Flash Player browser-based runtime is the most productive way to deliver content to users across operating systems and devices. Runtime consistency reduces the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different device, software, network and user contexts and helps improve business results.

Developer Productivity

Global error handler

The new global error handler enables developers to write a single handler to process all runtime errors that weren’t part of a try/catch statement. Improve application reliability and user experience by catching and handling unexpected runtime errors and present custom error messages. When using the global error handler in a SWF running in the debug player, error pop-ups will not be shown.

Globalization support

New ActionScript globalization APIs allow Flash Player to use the values chosen in the operating system preferences to process text and lists and present information based on location context, without any knowledge of locale requirements. Choose a specific format independent of the currently selected locale on the operating system. Locale specific information and processing can include: date, time, currency and number formatting; currency and number parsing; string comparison for sorting or searching for text; and upper/lower case conversions.

Designed for Mobility

To make it possible to deploy SWF content on smartphones and other mobile devices that have limited processing power and memory availability compared to PCs, a tremendous amount of work has gone into to making Flash Player 10.1 “ready for mobility”. This work includes performance improvements, such as rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations, in addition to hardware acceleration of graphics and video. Improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage, and rendering/scripting performance benefit PCs as well as mobile devices.

New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities including support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, and accelerometer, bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience.

Mobile text input

Flash Player 10.1 provides support for use of native device virtual keyboards with TextField support if no physical keyboard is detected. A virtual keyboard is automatically raised and lowered in response to focus changes on text fields when editing text on mobile devices supporting a virtual keyboard to enable unobstructed and intuitive text editing. The focused text field is centered in the visible region of the page and appropriately zoomed/scrolled to ensure it is not obscured by the virtual keyboard. Upon screen rotation, incoming calls, or other system events, any already existing text input is retained. The virtual keyboard works with TextField but does not currently work with the Text Layout Framework or other Flash Text Engineflash.text.engine text.

Multi-touch and gestures

Developers can take advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities using new ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events. Create multi-touch aware content for a wide range of devices and multi-touch capable machines running Microsoft Windows 7. Interact with multiple objects simultaneously or work with native gestures, such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale and two-finger tap.

Accelerometer input

New ActionScript Accelerometer class provides a way to receive acceleration values in X, Y and Z axes from native device accelerometer sensors to ActionScript. Leverage accelerometer input on supported devices for user input control and to control screen orientation. Developers can specify the rate of accelerometer updates to conserve battery life.

Screen orientation

(Mobile only)
Automatically align the screen depending on the direction the device is held, i.e. switching between portrait and landscape modes, with or without the support of accelerometers. SWF content can adjust to changing screen orientation, consistent with built-in applications on devices. Event information gives developers the option to change the layout or format of their content when reorientation occurs.

Optimized SWF management for mobile

(Mobile only)
Flash Player 10.1 optimizes SWF loading and playback for mobile CPU and memory limitations to provide a better user experience. Instances are loaded or deferred based on SWF priority, visibility and available memory and CPU resources to enable more immediate browsing experiences without waiting for every SWF on a page to load. Developers can indicate SWF priority through a new HTML parameter, hasPriority. Deferred instances are loaded after the HTML page load is complete, and offscreen and invisible instances are started when they become visible. Flash Player will also automatically pause SWF playback it is not in view or the foreground application, for example when a call is received or alarm goes off, to reduce CPU utilization, battery usage and memory usage.

Sleep mode

(Mobile only)
The Flash Player timer slows down when the mobile device goes into screen-saver or similar mode to reduce CPU and battery consumption on mobile devices. The timer returns to the default setting when a wake-up event is triggered. There is no interruption in audio/video playback. Incoming phone calls pause Flash Player.

Graphics hardware acceleration

(Mobile only)
A GPU-based vector renderer replaces the software renderer on smartphones and other mobile devices, resulting in faster rendering performance for more expressive user experiences while consuming less power. Supports hardware acceleration of 3D effects, vector graphics, color transforms, alpha, device and embedded text, Saffron and surfaces.

Video hardware decoding

Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across mobile devices and PCs. Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU to improve video playback performance, reduce system resource utilization and preserve battery life.

Adaptive frame rate

(Mobile only)
Flash Player will monitor and lower the SWF frame rate to provide greater processing power for rendering, which can improve content usability and conserve CPU utilization on resource constrained mobile devices. If the frame rate drops below the threshold, Flash Player will drop frames to achieve the defined default frame rate of the SWF.

Enhanced Browser Integration

Flash Player 10.1 offers enhanced conformance to consistent browser usability guidelines, ensuring optimized user experiences and improved user control over privacy.

Browser privacy mode

(desktop only)
Flash Player 10.1 abides by the host browser’s “private browsing” mode, where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Private local shared objects behave like their public variants as long as Flash Player is in memory and local shared objects created during private browsing are removed when returning to public browsing mode. Existing shared objects are preserved but inaccessible until private browsing is turned off. Libraries in the Flash Player cache, like the Flex framework, are unaffected by private mode. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. No developer action required.

Out-of-memory management

Flash Player 10.1 prevents out-of-memory browser crashes by shutting down instances where a SWF attempts to allocate more memory than is available on the device. When a SWF tries to allocate more memory than is available on a device, Flash Player 10.1 adds logic to shut down Flash Player to prevent the browser from crashing. Users will receive notification to restart the SWF, or will see a notice to refresh the page if all instances must be shutdown.

Expanded Options for High Quality Media Delivery

Flash Player 10.1 includes a number of media quality of service improvements and is ready to take advantage of upcoming Adobe media servers that will provide new ways to deliver rich media experiences and create new business models. With new HTTP streaming and content protection features, premium audio and video content can be securely delivered within the browser. Streaming performance is enhanced with improved support for live events, buffer control and peer assisted networking. Network context-aware services, like adaptive frame rate, will enable smooth, uninterrupted media playback and improved resource utilization on mobile devices.

Content protection

(desktop only; output protection Windows only; requires Adobe Flash Access 2.0 SDK expected to be available the first half of 2010)
Media protected using the upcoming Adobe Flash Access 2.0 SDK can be played back securely in Flash Player 10.1 to support a wide range of business models, including video-on-demand, rental, and electronic sell-through, for streaming as well as download. Using industry-standard cryptography, Adobe Flash Access 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 provides a robust environment to protect content so it remains safe from tampering or capture throughout its lifecycle. Flash Player 10.1 supports output protection on Windows, enabling content providers to specify requirements for protection of analog and digital outputs, providing additional safeguards against unauthorized recording. Note: Encrypted content cannot be hardware accelerated in this release of Flash Player.

Peer-assisted networking

(requires Stratus)
The RTMFP protocol now supports groups, which enables an application to segment its users to send messages and data only between members of the group. Application level multicast provides one (or a few) -to-many streaming of continuous live video and audio live video chat using RTMFP groups.

HTTP streaming

HTTP streaming enables delivery of video-on-demand and live streaming using standard HTTP servers, or from HTTP servers at CDNs, leveraging standard HTTP infrastructure and SWF-level playback components. The addition of HTTP streaming will enable expanded protocol options to deliver live and recorded media to Flash Player, including full content protection for HTTP streamed video with Flash Access 2.0.

Smart reconnect

(Requires FMS 3.5.3 server, available Oct 2009)
Smart reconnect allows an RTMP stream to continue to play through the buffer even if the connection is disrupted, thereby making media experiences more tolerant of short term network failures and enabling non-disruptive video playback. When a connection is re-established the stream resumes playback. Developers can add re-connection logic in ActionScript to re-establish server connection and resume streaming without any disruption in the video.

Smart seek

(Requires FMS 3.5.3 server, available Oct 2009)
Smart seek allows you to seek within the buffer and introduces a new “back” buffer so you can easily rewind or fast forward video without going back to the server, reducing the start time after a seek. Smart seek can speed and improve the seeking performance of streamed videos and enable the creation of slow motion, double time, or “instant replay” experiences for streaming video.

Buffered stream catch-up

Buffered stream catch-up allows developers to set a target latency threshold that triggers slightly accelerated video playback to ensure that live video streaming stays in sync with real time over extended playback periods.

Dynamic Streaming enhancements

(Requires FMS 3.5.3 server, available Oct 2009)
The Dynamic Streaming capability introduced in Flash Player 10 and FMS 3.5 is enhanced to improve switching times between bitrates, reducing the time to receive the best content quality for available bandwidth and processing speed. Users no longer need to wait for the buffer to play through, resulting in a faster bitrate transition time and an uninterrupted video playback experience, regardless of bandwidth fluctuations.

Microphone Access

(desktop only)
Access binary data of the live and continuous waveform coming from the microphone to create new types of audio applications, such as audio recording for transcoding, karaoke, vocoder voice manipulation, sonographic analysis, pitch detection, and more.