...with support for H.264 and HE-AAC codecs!

Oct 2, 2007 06:59 GMT  ·  By

Adobe Labs announced yesterday yet another prerelease version of their award winning Flash Player 9 Update software, for Linux, Windows and Macintosh. This new beta version brings a lot of features and improvements over the previous releases, such as:

■ Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs. ■ Multi-core support for vector rendering. ■ Full screen mode with hardware scaling. ■ Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework.

Other bugfixes:

■ When creating a "playlist" consisting of an MP3 stream preceded by an FLV stream of the same sample rate, the MP3 audio does not play back correctly. ■ H.264 support and full-screen hardware scaling are at alpha quality. ■ H.264 files using the loop filter flag render with artifacts on multi-core systems. ■ Playing odd-width movies (with screen widths not divisible by 16), in full-screen mode, may cause a crash.

Known issues:

■ Opera and Netscape do not allow recursive calls using the ExternalInterface API into the Flash Player.

Developers and consumers can use this version to test the content to make sure that new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues. If you don't know how to install (for testing purposes only) this development version of the Flash Player plugin in Linux systems, please follow the instructions below:

Download the tar.gz archive and extract it. ■ Enter the install_flash_player_9_linux directory, open a terminal and type ./flashplayer-installer to run the installer. ■ Hit Enter and the installer will instruct you to close any opened browsers. ■ Hit Enter again, choose an installation method and follow the instructions. ■ Once the installation is complete, the plug-in will be installed in your Firefox or Opera browsers. ■ Verify the installation here.

You can download Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux right now from Softpedia.