14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has unveiled release candidate versions of its flagship platform products, Flash Player and AIR, with Flash Player 11.2 RC and AIR 3.2 RC. Since AIR 3.2 is built on top of Flash Player, it comes with most or all of the improvements and new features included in the Flash plugin.
Flash Player 11.2 may be a relatively minor update, but it comes with a number of important improvements.
Multithreaded video decoding
One touted new feature is a completely rewritten video decoding method, which should result in performance improvement across all platforms. Desktop platforms are supported for now, Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but more are coming.
"Multi-threaded pipeline was written grounds up to support lower end devices and full hardware stacks where all the decoding and rendering is offloaded to hardware. The benefits of the modernization of the pipeline would be visible from mobile devices, tvs, netbooks to high end desktops," Adobe explained (PDF).
Some of the improvements enabled by the new video decoding method are now more jitter for some videos, especially live streams, better frame rate thanks to fewer dropped frames, better seek frame accuracy, UI responsiveness even for demanding videos and more.
Background updates for Windows
Another new feature in Flash Player 11.2, that will only become visible once the stable version is made available, is background updates, on Windows. What this means is that updates to Flash Player can be delivered and installed without the user having to do anything or even being aware of the process.
Security updates will land faster and users will have one less thing to worry about while keeping their system up to date.
Mouse lock, relative mouse coordinates, right and middle click events
All of these features are aimed at one thing, gaming, specifically first-person games. Ways of locking the mouse to the app, disabling the cursor and using mouse movements for input are all needed to make first-person shooters a reality on Flash.
Hardware acceleration on more devices
Flash Player 11.2 also brings hardware acceleration to a wider number of devices. When first introduced, hardware acceleration only worked for drivers newer than 1st of January 2009.
This was an imposed block, since Adobe hadn't tested older drivers thoroughly to ensure that they worked. It has now and moved the block date back to 1st of January 2008, meaning more people will benefit from hardware acceleration on their devices.
All of these features and more minor ones will be included in Flash Player 11.2, which is coming very soon now that the release candidate version has been made available.