If you have been problems with your Flash player, or just want to have the latest version of everything, jump over to Adobe’s Flash Player 10 page to get the newest version.  What I am HOPING to see if a halt to the very annoying issue I have under FireFox and Chrome where Flash video playback halts after a few seconds in a browser that has been opened for a while.  

What do we know about the new features?

“Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Platform Business Unit, Adobe Systems, said Adobe Flash Player 10 delivers enhancements and new features such as new support for custom filters and effects, native 3-D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration. In addition, the new release builds on Adobe’s expertise with text to deliver a new text engine that provides interactive designers and developers with more text layout options and better creative control.”

It turns out though that GPU acceleration has to be specifically enabled by the Flash developer in order to work, according to this post over at the Tech Report.  So while the idea of GPU accelerated Flash sounded really cool, it doesn’t look like it’s going to live up to the hype quite yet.  And I think if it was going to be anything exciting NVIDIA would have been banging down my door on a daily basis.

“We’re providing unprecedented creative control for developers and designers,” with Flash Player 10, Barclay said. In addition, he said the new release is available immediately on Windows, Mac and Linux, including new support for Ubuntu 7 and 8. “Linux is a first-class citizen for us,” he said.

Barclay said users can take advantage of the 3-D capabilities through easy-to-use APIs and with an enhanced drawing API.

“Another major improvement is the ability to create your own effects with Adobe Pixel Bender, which can be applied to content live to do things that up to now could only be done on the desktop,” Barclay said. The Adobe Pixel Bender also features a multi-threaded calculation engine that can be used for other purposes.

Indeed, Adobe Flash Player 10 extends the expressive capabilities of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product line with new levels of Flash technology integration to streamline collaboration and enhance the design/develop workflow, Adobe officials said.

Users can create custom filters and effects with Adobe Pixel Bender, which is the same technology behind many filters and special effects in Adobe After Effects CS4 software. Developers targeting Adobe Flash Player 10 can use these filters, blend modes and fills to animate effects or change the effect on rich media content at runtime. Flash Player 10 also enables new capabilities and performance improvements in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. This includes easy-to-use 3-D effects that enable designers to design in 2-D and easily transform and animate in 3-D.