Flash and AIR betas also bring HW decode

Adobe today fulfilled earlier promises and provided betas for both Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. Both are the first from Adobe to have a Flash layer that supports multi-touch input, including gestures such as pinching to zoom the window. Flash Player specifically gets H.264 hardware decoding through newer video chipsets and, initially for Windows PCs, can significantly reduce the workload on the CPU or a notebook's battery.

The gain is particularly helpful for netbooks using NVIDIA's Ion chipset as it should enable HD video in Flash where it was previously only available for downloads.

Both add native support for microphones, but AIR 2 adds significantly more native communication with the system itself and can talk both to local apps as well as to mass storage devices like flash drives or memory cards. It works better for serving content and has a newer version of the WebKit rendering engine that supports HTML5 and faster JavaScript, much like Android 2.0 or Safari.

Either beta is available today for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Mobile betas, which should be the first to provide broadly available Flash on smartphones, aren't due until early next year for Android and Symbian. The HTC Hero already offers an early version of in-browser flash.

By Electronista Staff