Flash Player Update 3 Beta 1 released, tons of improvements on board!

Flash Player Update 3 Beta 1 (build 9.0.60.120) has just been released. Tinic Uro, from the Flash Player developer team of Adobe, posted an overview of the new features which include hardware accelerated video playback. In his post Tinic tries to summarize the many improvements that have been made to the player. 

Here is a short list of what you can expect from the latest version of the Flash Player:

• Mip map support for all bitmaps for Flash 9 or newer content for improving the quality and rendering performance of downscaled bitmaps, perfect for thumbnails
• Multi-threaded vector renderer, so you could use up to 4 Cores/CPUs for vector rendering
• Multi-threaded bitmap filters for bitmap functionality specifically
• Multi-threaded video decoding, the VP6 video codec will now run in a separate thread if a multi-core system is detected which leaves the main thread to do rendering and post processing of the video
• Full-screen mode with hardware scaling
• Zoom transition effect when going into full screen mode
• Less tearing in the new full screen mode
• Linux plugin with the XEmbed protocol
• Plenty of performance tweaks and bug fixes

Download the Flash Player Update.