After spending a couple of months in beta, the latest version of Adobe's Flash plugin has been released to the world.
The big addition in Flash 10.2 is the Stage Video API. According to the developers, this builds on the H.264 hardware acceleration introduced in 10.1, but extends it to the entire video-pipeline. If a site is designed to use the new tools, CPU usage during video playback can apparently decrease by up to 85 per cent compared to one that doesn't support the API.
Although having to update Flash player files with Stage Video support is a pain, the underlying videos can be left unchanged, making the process relatively easy for website admins. According to the announcement, YouTube and Vimeo are already working on updated versions of their sites that will make full use of the API.
Other improvements in this version include support for full-screen playback on multi-monitor systems - previous versions would exit fullscreen when working on a second monitor - and custom native mouse cursors as well as enhancements to sub-pixel text rendering. There's also support for the GPU-based rendering-tech found in the preview of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9.
All of these improvements should be especially noticeable to anyone running OS X, since the latest version is apparently much more efficient and stable.
You can download Flash 10.2 now from Adobe for Windows, OS X and Linux for 32-bit versions of all browsers, although Chrome users will be updated automatically. Unfortunately there's still no support for 64-bit systems, so anyone using a native 64-bit browser will have to stick with the Square preview release for the time being.
Once you've downloaded the plug-in, you can test the results on Adobe's preview page, which has high-def videos that can toggle Stage Video support to compare the results.
