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

￭ Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs.
￭ Support for full-screen mode on Linux.
￭ Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs.
￭ Higher quality and performance for downscaling large bitmaps (SWF 9 only).
￭ Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes. This feature is enabled in the Flex 3 beta available on Adobe Labs.

Other bugfixes:

￭ If you use hardware scaling when you send Flash content to full-screen mode, some elements may not render correctly when you return to the normal (in the browser window) mode.
￭ Hardware scaling is not available on Linux.
￭ On Linux, mouse events do not work as expected when "Select windows when the mouse moves over them" is enabled.

Known issues:

￭ H.264 support and full-screen hardware scaling on the Linux platform are at alpha quality.
￭ In full-screen mode on Linux, playing odd-width movies (with screen widths not divisible by 16) may cause a crash.

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.