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Beta Release Notes

Updated: September 26, 2008

These release notes document known issues related to the beta versions of Adobe® Flash® Player 10, code named "Astro". The current release candidate build for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms is 10.0.12.10. The beta build for Solaris platforms is 10.0.0.584.

Please uninstall any versions of the Flash Player before updating your installation.

Overview

The Flash Player 10 beta is available in all supported languages; however, the beta installers are only in English and we can only accept feedback in English at this time. Flash Player beta downloads are available in the following forms:

  • Windows ActiveX Control
  • Windows Plugin
  • Macintosh OS X (10.4 and above) Universal Binary Plugin
  • Linux Plugin

Installation instructions are detailed below.

Release versions of Flash Player 9 are available. Installers can be found at the Flash Player Download Center on Adobe.com.

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System Requirements

System requirements for Flash Player 9 are available on Adobe.com. Flash Player 10 no longer supports Mac OS X versions 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3, nor Windows 98. Ubuntu support has been added, and we have updated our support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux distributions as follows:

Supported for Flash Player 9 Supported for Flash Player 10
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 update 9, RHEL 4 update 7 (AS/ES/WS) RHEL 5 update 2
Novell SUSE™ 9.x or 10.1 Novell SUSE OpenSuse 11
  Ubuntu™ 7.10, 8.04

 

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Features and Enhancements

Flash Player 10 includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes, including:

  • Creative Expression
    • Custom Filters and Effects
    • 3D Effects
    • New Text Engine
    • Text Layout Components
    • Drawing API Enhancements
    • Color Management
  • Visual Performance Improvements
    • GPU Compositing
    • GPU Blitting
    • Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1)
    • Vector Data Type
  • Rich Media
    • Enhanced Sound APIs
    • Dynamic Streaming
    • RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
    • Speex Audio Codec
  • Other Community Requested Enhancements
    • NSS for Linux
    • Linux WMODE
    • Video4Linux v2 Support
    • unloadAndStop
    • Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access
    • File Reference
    • Dynamic Sound Generation
    • Large Bitmap Support
    • Context Menu
    • GB18030 Compliance
    • Ubuntu OS Support

Creative Expression

Flash Player 10 will further the innovative and cinematic experiences users have come to expect from RIAs and rich media, taking web applications to a level previously only seen on the desktop.

Custom Filters and Effects — Expand your creative control by creating your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used to power filters and effects in After Effects CS3.  Pixel Bender is a high performance image processing language that takes the pain out of writing custom, multithreaded effects and filters that can be added to web applications without any Flash Player update.  Custom filters and effects can be combined with existing native Flash Player filters and applied to all display objects, including vectors, bitmaps, and video while retaining full interactivity. Custom effects can be parameterized to animate and change the effect at runtime. There is minimal impact on application size as complex filters are generally under 1KB.

3D Effects — Add a new dimension to your applications and extend the creative possibilities by easily transforming and animating any 2D display object through 3D space, while retaining all of the interactivity that exists in 2D space.  Fast, extremely lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users via ActionScript or Open Source libraries such as PaperVision3D, Sandy and Away3D available to everyone.  Create complex effects with simple code by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other. Inheritance makes it easy to rapidly apply changes across objects.

New Text Engine — A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text layout and interactivity APIs to create component-level text objects.  The new text engine expands creative freedom by treating device fonts as first class citizens that can be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled and have filters applied as if they were embedded.  The new text engine also offers right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Text Layout Components — An extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components, coming in future to Adobe Labs, provides advanced, easy-to-integrate layout functionality that enables typographic creative expression.  Layout and style text with tables, inline images, and column flow through components that are compatible with both Flash and Flex, all while getting the benefits of the new text engine.  Rich text components allow designers and developers to flow text and complex scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, across multiple columns like a newspaper, around tables and inline images, from right-to-left, left-to-right, bi-directionally, or vertically.  Selection, editing, and wrapping of text are handled as would be expected for the different layouts.

Drawing API Enhancements — Enhancements to the Drawing API make runtime drawing much easier with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line. Developers can tweak parts of curves, change styling, replace parts, and use custom filters and effects, delivering improved performance, creative control, and developer productivity. The enhancements extend the current drawing API to allow for read/write rendering and triangle drawing with UV coordinates, while adding memory and performance improvements that allow developers to create shapes using ActionScript that can be modified at runtime without re-drawing, edit dynamic drawings by modifying paths, and chain methods together to instantiate operations with a single method call. Support for repeating bitmaps using GraphicsTrianglePath and drawTriangles has been added.

Color Management — Flash Player 10 employs color management to deliver web applications with the most accurate color possible, so your favorite web destinations look the way they were intended.  Opt-in color management allows you to convert SWFs into sRGB (standard RGB), an international standard color space formulated by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Color management works with the monitor’s ICC color profile, turning the entire SWF into a color-managed object.  Color management can be toggled on and off at runtime.

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Visual Performance Improvements

Flash Player 10 builds on the dramatic script execution performance improvements introduced in Flash Player 9 with the new ActionScript 3.0 Virtual Machine (AVM2) by enhancing the equally important visual performance of your RIAs and rich media experiences.  Leveraging the power of the GPU for blitting and compositing reduces the load on the CPU and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications, resulting in more fluid, realistic and responsive user experiences.

GPU Compositing — Combining images, filters, and video in your SWF just got faster.  Your video card can be used to do compositing on all raster content.  Utilizing the hardware processing power of the graphics card, GPU compositing accelerates compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software on the CPU.  GPU compositing is applied when specified in the HTML parameters provided appropriate graphics hardware is available. If the hardware does not provide required capability, Flash Player will fall back to the software rendering without user interaction.  Hardware compositing takes advantage of the tremendous memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU, reducing the load on the CPU, and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications, resulting in more fluid, realistic and responsive user experiences. Open GL 2.0 video card with GLSL capabilities required to use this feature. When in use with the beta, a green square will appear in the upper left corner when accelerated.

GPU Blitting — Paint SWFs into the browser using your video card by choosing this new HTML parameter. Your content can run faster and give you the freedom to do more.  Developers can enable or disable GPU surfacing to perform hardware blitting for each SWF within a web page without having to recompile the SWF. GPU surfacing extends the hardware-scaled fullscreen view introduced in Flash Player 9 Update 3 and applies it to the browser window so that the pixels drawn to the browser go through the GPU, resulting in improved performance and reduced CPU demand, rendering video- or image-intensive applications faster.

Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1) — An update to the Saffron anti-aliasing text engine increases performance and quality of anti-aliased text, particularly for Asian character rendering.  Support for stroke fonts reduces memory requirements.

Vector Data Type — Flash Player 10 and ActionScript 3.0 add support for a new data type called Vector that is an ECMAScript 4 proposed language addition that is similar to an Array but requires that all elements be of the same type.  By having a consistent type, performance on Vectors is significantly higher than Arrays.  Vectors work as a parameterized type.

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Rich Media

Flash Player 10 introduces new audio and video features that will be available with intended future releases of Adobe Flash Media Server or other Adobe server products to optimize the delivery of rich media and enhance end-user experiences.

Enhanced Sound APIs — Work with loaded MP3 audio at a lower level in Flash Player 10. You can extract audio data as a byteArray. The new APIs also let you have access to the sound buffer through a callback that is triggered as the buffer runs low. You can supply data from the extraction API or you can produce dynamic audio on your own. The combined APIs will let you do application level audio compositing and even audio filtering with Adobe Pixel Bender.

Dynamic Streaming — Always show the best video possible with streams that can automatically adjust to changing network conditions. By changing bitrates, you can keep your user engaged and avoid start-and-stop video. Dynamic streaming provides the best possible experience to the video consumer based on their bandwidth environment.  Video streams over RTMP from intended future releases of Flash Media Server can dynamically change bitrate as network conditions change. Quality of Service metrics, exposed via ActionScript and providing real-time network or CPU information, allow developers to take control of the video playback and adjust the streaming experience accordingly. This feature is part of Flash Player 10 but will only be available with intended future releases of Flash Media Server. Flash Player 10 now supports dynamic switching between media with different audio sampling rates as well. We have introduced a new NetStreamInfo property, NetStreamInfo.maxBytesPerSecond, which specifies the maximum capacity of the NetStream at a given point in time.

RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) — RTMFP provides a UDP-based secure network transport alternative to RTMP-over-TCP. To take advantage of the feature you will need to establish a net connection via future releases of Flash Media Server or other Adobe server products. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is an efficient and standardized Internet protocol for delivering media assets because of its support for lossy delivery, improving performance of real time communication. RTMFP is always encrypted which helps protect media delivery. This technology is a result of Adobe’s acquisition of Amicima, Inc. in 2006. If you are interested in being part of the private prerelease for RTMFP, please send an email to fmsprerelease@adobe.com with your contact details. See the RTMFP FAQ for more information about the new Real Time Media Flow Protocol feature in Flash Player 10.

Speex Audio Codec — The new, higher fidelity Speex voice codec offers an alternative to Nellymoser for audio that delivers the lowest-latency audio experience possible. When RTMP or RTMFP is used with future releases of Flash Media Server, live and unbuffered Speex transmissions will take advantage of RTMFP's partial-reliability feature to reduce network latency.

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Other Community Requested Enhancements

In addition to the new creative expression, visual performance and rich media features, Flash Player 10 includes a number of new features that have been frequently requested by the community.

NSS for Linux – Flash Player 10 for Linux now supports Mozilla’s Network Security Services (NSS) for secure network connections.

Linux WMODE — Flash Player for Linux now supports windowless mode (transparent and opaque).  Windowless mode means proper blending between SWFs and the  HTML above and below the SWF content..  Windowless mode on Linux requires the latest Firefox 3 to work.

Video4Linux v2 Support — Support for the Video4Linux v2 (V4L2) camera API has been added.

unloadAndStop — This new ActionScript 3.0 API extends the Loader.unload API to help unloaded content use zero CPU and potentially unload from memory. After calling unloadAndStop on loaded content the player will attempt to stop all playback of MovieClips (recursively), and remove references to as many objects as possible (Sounds, NetStreams, EventListeners, etc.) that were not cleaned up by the unloaded movie. This will make it far more likely that the Garbage Collector will collect the memory used by this loaded file. This is useful when unloading unknown 3rd party content.

Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access — In Flash Player 10, key events are supported for non-printing keys such as arrows, shift, enter, tab, space, etc.  Limited access to the keyboard will allow fullScreen games and video controls with keyboard access in a secure way.

File Reference runtime access — Bring users into the experience by letting them load files into your RIA.  You can work with the content at runtime and even save it back when you are done through the browse dialog box.  Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server.  You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

Dynamic Sound Generation — Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object.

Large Bitmap Support — Flash Player 10 now provides the ability to manipulate large bitmaps up to 16,777,216 pixels (4096 by 4096) with a maximum length of 8191 pixels per side.

Context Menu — Developers now have more control over what can be displayed in the context menu through the use of ActionScript APIs for common text field context menu items, supporting plain and rich text. The clipboard menu provides access to the clipboard in a safe and controlled way, and you can write handlers to paste text.

GB18030 Compliance — GB18030 is the latest character set mandated by the Chinese government for displaying text. Flash Player 10 compliance with this official character set ensures support for all applications deployed on Flash Player that require GB18030.

Ubuntu OS Support — Flash Player 10 now supports Ubuntu, one of the most popular flavors of Linux.

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Installation and Uninstallation

Uninstallation

Before installing pre-release versions of Flash Player, please uninstall any existing versions of Flash Player.

Windows—Internet Explorer

Due to security features in the Adobe Flash Player ActiveX Control, you must first remove all current pre-release installations of Flash Player from your Windows system before going back to an older release version of the Flash Player ActiveX Control:

  1. Download the Uninstaller (prerelease version 4.0.0.11)
  2. Open the Windows Command Prompt ( Run > cmd ).
  3. Navigate to the directory where the uninstaller was downloaded.
  4. Run "Uninstall Adobe Flash Player.exe /clean."

Windows—Plugin-based browsers

Download and run the Uninstaller (prerelease version 4.0.0.11).

Macintosh

Run the appropriate uninstaller available from this TechNote.

Linux

Manual removal (for users who installed the plug-in via Install script):

  1. Delete libflashplayer.so binary and flashplayer.xpt file in directory /home//.mozilla/plugins/

Linux RPM removal:

  1. As root, enter in terminal: # rpm -e flash-plugin
  2. Click Enter and follow prompts

Installation

Follow the instructions that apply to your platform to install Flash Player.

Windows

  1. Save the Installer to your desktop, and wait for it to download completely.
  2. An Installer icon will appear on your desktop. Double-click on it.
  3. You may be prompted to close open browser windows to continue with the installation.
  4. You can verify the version you have installed by visiting the About Flash page.

Macintosh

  1. Save the Installer to your desktop, and wait for it to download completely.
  2. An Installer icon will appear on your desktop. Double-click on it.
  3. You may be prompted to close open browser windows to continue with the installation.
  4. You can verify the version you have installed by visiting the About Flash page.

Linux (.tar.gz)

  1. Click the "Download .tar.gz" link. A dialog box will appear asking you where to save the file.
  2. Save the .tar.gz file to your desktop and wait for the file to download completely.
  3. Unpackage the file. A directory called install_flash_player_10_linux will be created.
  4. In terminal, navigate to this directory and type ./flashplayer-installer to run the installer. Click Enter. The installer will instruct you to shut down your browser(s).
  5. Once the installation is complete, the plug-in will be installed in your Mozilla browser. To verify, launch Mozilla and choose Help > About Plug-ins from the browser menu.

Linux (.rpm)

  1. Click the "Download .rpm" link. A dialog box will appear asking you where to save the file.
  2. Save the .rpm file to your desktop and wait for the file to download completely.
  3. In terminal, navigate to the desktop and type # rpm -Uvh <rpm_package_file>. Click Enter. (Note: This must be done as a root user). The installer will instruct you to shut down your browser(s).
  4. Once the installation is complete, the plug-in will be installed in your Mozilla browser. To verify, launch Mozilla and choose Help > About Plug-ins from the browser menu.

Solaris

The following instructions assume that you have unpacked the archive .tar.bz2 into the top level of your user directory. Your user directory is referred to as $HOME. Adobe Flash Player can be installed in two ways:

A. Install Adobe Flash Player system-wide, making it available to all users of the computer
-or-
B. Install Adobe Flash Player in a user account, making it available only to that user.

A. Installing Adobe Flash Player System-Wide:

  1. You will need root access to the computer to install Adobe Flash Player system-wide.
  2. Copy Adobe Flash Player (libflashplayer.so) into the Firefox/Mozilla plug-in directory.
  3. Restart Firefox/Mozilla.
  4. Verify the installation by typing about:plugins in the location bar or by choosing Help > About Plugins. You should see Adobe Flash Player listed as "Shockwave Flash 10.0 "
  5. To test Adobe Flash Player go to: http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayerversion

B. Installing Adobe Flash Player in a User Account:

  1. If you have not already used Firefox/Mozilla from the user account, launch Firefox/Mozilla and close it. This will create a preferences directory (/.mozilla) in your home directory.
  2. Create a directory named "plugins" in the Firefox/Mozilla preferences directory. If the mkdir command reports the error "cannot make directory: File exists", this means that the directory was already present and did not need to be created.
  3. Copy libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt into the plug-in directory.
  4. Restart Firefox/Mozilla
  5. Verify the installation by typing about:plugins in the location bar or by choosing Help > About Plugins. You should see Adobe Flash Player listed as "Shockwave Flash 10.0 "
  6. To test Adobe Flash Player go to: http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayerversion
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Identifying Your Graphics Card

Flash Player 10 beta includes enhancements to the full-screen mode feature. If you experience any issues with full-screen mode, please include graphics card information in your feedback report. Specifically, knowing the graphics card vendor, model, driver version, and amount of VRAM will help us to investigate any issues. To identify your graphics card, see the instructions below.

Windows

  1. Click the Start menu and select Run.
  2. Enter dxdiag to open the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.
  3. Click on the Display tab for graphics card and driver information.

    DirectX Dialog

Macintosh

  1. Click on the Apple icon on the upper left-hand corner of your monitor. Select "About This Mac" from the menu.

    About This Mac
  2. From the "About This Mac" window, click on the "More Info…" button.

    More Info
  3. From the following menu, click on the "Graphics/Displays" line to retrieve graphic card information.

    Computer Info
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Known Issues

  • Solaris:
    • Flash Player displays some text in device fonts incorrectly. (237165)
    • Menus on the www.miniusa.com open with artifacts. (237832)
    • array.sortOn crashes Flash Player 10. (237400)
    • Windowless mode while in Fullscreen not implemented. (235730)
    • Wmode doesn't work correctly with Firefox3 on Solaris.
  • For Linux, Flash Player 10 only supports browsers that are supported by each specific distribution of Linux. There are issues unrelated to Flash Player that can occur if a user installs a browser that is not supported on that Linux distribution. (For example, at the time this was written, Firefox 3 was not officially supported by Ubuntu 7.)
  • 3D Effects:
    • Components don’t work properly with 3D Effects.
    • 2.5D or 3D objects do not print correctly to PDF nor to hardware printer. (232562)
  • Color Management: The ability to read source profiles is not included in this feature, by design.  Comments or questions can be posted to the Flash Player 10 Forum.
  • GPU Compositing and GPU Blitting:
    • Issues may occur with unsupported drivers.
    • Hardware acceleration does not currently optimize the Alpha, Erase, Invert & Subtract blendmodes and vectors for GPU compositing.
    • o For Linux and Solaris, the hardware acceleration feature will not work if you are using a compositing window manager (compiz). In this case, Flash Player 10 Beta will always fall back to software. If you would like to test Flash Player 10 Beta on Linux or Solaris, please disable your compositing window manager. (237833)
  • Dynamic Streaming: An intended future release of Adobe Flash Media Server is required to use this feature.  If you are interested in being part of the private prerelease program, please send an email to fmsprerelease@adobe.com with your contact details.
  • RTMFP:
    • An intended future release of Adobe Flash Media Server is required to use this feature.  If you are interested in being part of the private prerelease program, please send an email to fmsprerelease@adobe.com with your contact details.
  • Speex:
    • An intended future release of Adobe Flash Media Server is required to use this feature.  If you are interested in being part of the private prerelease program, please send an email to fmsprerelease@adobe.com with your contact details.
    • Live audio does not work on Mac when audio capture is 96 kHz. (221951)
  • Acrobat Connect Pro meeting will not install the Acrobat Connect Add-in if running in FP10. Workaround: install FP 9.0.124, then install Connect Add-in, then upgrade to FP10.
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Fixed Issues

  • Many Linux camera issues have been fixed. Please report any additional issues you encounter.
  • Linux full-screen optimizations have been made. Please report any additional issues you encounter.
  • startDrag() does not work when movie clip is 3D. (216415)
  • LiveCycle WorkSpace cannot log in using Flash Player 10 Beta. (223394) WORKAROUND: Use Flash Player 9.0.124.0.
  • Vector printing on Macs works now!
  • New Text Engine: Vector Printing isn't currently enabled.
  • Custom Filters and Effects:
    • Mac PPC: Color distortions may appear when applying a Shader. ShaderJob returns unexpected values for some Pixel Bender functions.
    • Linux: Shader Jobs may return NaN instead of an expected Number value.
  • Drawing API: Strokes are not visible on paths drawn with drawTriangles or GraphicsTrianglePaths.  The lineShaderStyle is not implemented in Flash Player 10 Beta.
  • Context Menu: The new AS3 Clipboard is currently only working for Mac and Windows. It is not yet working for the Unix players.
  • Uploading images using Photoshop Express does not work with Flash Player 10 Beta.  (1786882)  WORKAROUND: Use Flash Player 9.0.124.0.
  • Dynamic Streaming:
    • A crash when switching between videos of different resolutions has been fixed.
    • A new Play Status event when switching between streams now actually happens: NetStream.Play.TransitionComplete.
  • RTMFP:
    • Changing NetStream.BufferTime on the subscriber side of P2P connection, causes video to stop and possible crash
    • No NetStream onStatus messages received when using NetStream.pause(), NetStream.resume() or NetStream.togglePause() for P2P connection
    • Intermittent crashes/hangs when subscribing/unsubscribing multiple times to P2P NetStream.
    • peerStreams array includes null streams in some cases.
  • Speex:
    • Disconnect and re-connect network on Mac publisher causes sending garbled audio with USB audio devices. (227185)
    • Speex audio may deteriorate when computer is overloaded. (222082)
    • Peer-to-peer Nellymoser may incur in quality degradation when packets are lost. (222469)
    • Soundtransform for Speex does not work in loopback mode
    • Linux-specific issues:
      • Flash Player 10 hangs when subscribing to a live audio stream.  (222283)
      • Linux subscriber receives deteriorated audio for about 20 seconds when switching from Nellymoser to Speex codec. (222306)
      • Linux Subscriber P2P only: When Nellymoser audio is attached, the video plays slowly on the subscriber side. (222851)
  • Video playback issues on PPC Macs have been resolved.
  • Setting data on the system clipboard using System.setClipboard() now requires user interaction. This security enhancement helps mitigate potential clipboard attacks, and developers may need to update existing content. For more information, read the Flash Player 10 Security Changes article on Adobe.com.
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