New Adobe Flash and Air in Beta

Last week, Adobe offered up a prerelease of its latest versions of Adobe Air and Adobe Flash. One of the unique things is that they pushed out the beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are a lot of new and exciting features for the new versions.

For Flash, they offer H.264 Hardware Video Acceleration for Windows using UVD2 for ATI Radeon graphics hardware, NVIDIA hardware with PureVideo, Intel GMA 4-Series acceleration support, and even Broadcom video acceleration support via their Crystal HD Enhanced Video Accelerator. Unfortunately for us, as Linux users, they didn’t opt to include Nvidia VDPAU or VA-API support.

For Air, there are a lot of new developer features that will increase functionality when developers integrate them into their programs. For the end-user, the system offers reduced CPU and memory usage, as well as support for features like multitouch.

Ultimately, Adobe plans to push 64-bit Linux versions of these applications. They have had a 64-bit prerelease of Flash for a while which was not updated as part of this beta. 64-Bit Air is held up by waiting for a 64-bit Flash build. No such flash has been released.

We look forward to Adobe pushing out equal versions of Flash for all major operating systems as a matter of policy. We hope they follow through and that more companies follow their example.

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