Flash Player Adds Hardware Decoding (H.264) on Mac OS X - Download Now

Mac users looking to get H.264 hardware acceleration out of Flash Player are no longer required to download the Adobe Labs Flash Player Gala Beta edition, the  San Jose, California-based software vendor has revealed in an update.

According to the release notes for Flash Player 10.1.82.76, Adobe has included the hardware acceleration code into the standard build, listing the change amongst a myriad of other tweaks and enhancements.

“Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across supported mobile devices and PCs,” Adobe Systems says.

“Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance, reducing system resource utilization, and preserving battery life,” the company explains.

Flash GPU acceleration requires an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M solution. Older unibody MacBooks or Mac minis are equipped with the necessary hardware to handle H.264, as are models integrating 320M or GT 330M cards. Mac OS X 10.6.3 is also required to take advantage of Flash GPU acceleration.

Flash Player 10.1 also 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,” Adobe Systems outlines.

Among other noteworthy changes, “developers can now take advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities using new ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events,” Adobe says.

Accelerometer input is also supported, with read support for acceleration values in X, Y and Z axes from native device accelerometer sensors in ActionScript. To leverage accelerometer support for user input control on compatible devices, developers can specify the rate of accelerometer updates and conserve battery life.

Download Adobe Flash Player for Mac OS X (Free)