December 04th 2007 | Jens C Brynildsen

Flash Player 9 Update 3 available to end users

After a long time in Beta, Adobe released a third update to the Flash Player since the original launch. The new player offers client-side caching, MPEG4 video support, Hardware scaling, multicore processor support as well as support for OSX Leopard

This new version is simultaneously available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Justin Everett-Church has written an extensive overview of all these new features on the Adobe Developer Connection (ADC) site. Tinic Uro also posted a condensed list of bugs nailed in this release, code named Moviestar. What we find most exciting (and annoying) with this release is that these are all brand new additions. The features are brilliant, but if you want to use them, you will have to add detection code to see if each user needs to upgrade. There's no statistics available that tells the distribution of these sub-versions. Adobe only provides stats for the major player versions, so you can't really know when it's a good time to use the features on a public facing site.

Mpeg4 (H.264) video and AAC audio will be huge a year from now. With todays release, broadcasters can really start planning how to leverage Flash's distribution and the MPG4 format to create new and better experiences for their viewers.

The hardware scaling added will allow playback of fullscreen, HD video (if the bandwidth allows). The scaling of the video from part-screen to full-screen will be hardware assisted, so if the user has a slow machine but also has a decent graphics card, he/she may still be able to view fullscreen content. This is just the beginning of a new trend for the Flash Player. Hydra is going to change how we all think about Flash in the year to come.

Note that this elease has some changes to security that may affect your work. Worth a read as it involves stricter rules for the use of policy files. All in all, another great release from the Flash Player team. Let's keep our fingers crossed that all the bugs are nailed and there's no surprises. It's been a while since there were serious bugs in the player and that's really just great. When you go to download the new player, note that the Player now has a new look + icon as well.

(via Justin Everett-Church)

Click here to download the new release version of the player