Adobe Flash Player 10

Adobe Flash Player 10 – Community requested enhancements

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

This new ActionScript 3.0 API adds unload functionality similar to the unload behavior in ActionScript 2.0. After calling unloadAndStop on loaded content, it will be immediately removed stopping all audio, removing eventListeners, and becoming inaccessible through ActionScript.
Limited full-screen keyboard access

In Flash Player 10, key events are supported for nonprinting keys such as arrows, Shift, Tab, Space, and so forth. Limited access to the keyboard will allow full-screen 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 finished through the Browse dialog box. Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without roundtripping 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.
Large bitmap support

Flash Player 10 now provides the ability to manipulate larger bitmaps, up to 16,777,216 pixels (4,096 × 4,096) with a maximum length of 8,191 pixels per side.

Adobe Flash Player 10 – Rich media

Flash Player 10 introduces new audio and video features, some of which 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 by extracting audio data as a byteArray and supplying it to the sound buffer. The new audio APIs enable you to 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 users engaged and avoid start-and-stop video. Dynamic streaming provides the best possible experience to video consumers based on their bandwidth environment. Video streams over RTMP from intended future releases of Flash Media Server and can dynamically change bitrate as network conditions change.
Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP)

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 NetConnection via future releases of Flash Media Server or other Adobe server products. See the RTMFP FAQ (PDF, 166K) 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 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.

Adobe Flash Player 10 – 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 (AVM) 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.

New WMODE choices

In Flash Player 9 Update 3, the first hardware acceleration capabilities were added to Flash Player through hardware-scaled full screen. In Flash Player 10, the same performance gains will be delivered to the browser window through new hardware-based WMODE HTML parameters. The direct WMODE will use your video card to paint pixels to the screen as fast as possible while freeing up your CPU to work on other tasks. The GPU mode works with newer video cards to do much more of the work of transformation and compositing on the video card.
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. It 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.

Adobe Flash Player 10 – Creative expression

Creative expression has been the cornerstone of Flash since its creation. As its focus has been expanded to include application development, games, and video, we haven’t lost sight of the fact that whatever type of content you are working on, design and experience are important. The features below are new capabilities of Flash Player that will help you make exciting and intuitive interactions.
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. Create complex effects with simple code by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other. Inheritance makes it easy to rapidly apply changes across objects in intuitive ways.

For users who are looking to work with 3D on a lower level or for those that use community 3D engines, Flash Player 10 includes new capabilities in the drawing API to draw a complex shape out of a series of triangles, mapping textures through the use of UV coordinates.

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Justin Everett-Church
Justin Everett-Church

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Created:
11 August 2008
Modified:
15 October 2008
User Level:
All
Products:
Flash Player

Introducing Adobe Flash Player 10

As senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player, I am really excited to tell you about Flash Player 10. But before I drill into new features and improvements, I want to encourage you to download Flash Player 10, code-named Astro, from the Flash Player Download Center.

Now that you’ve downloaded Flash Player 10, I am ready to deliver the inside scoop. As you can imagine, we receive a lot of feature requests from designers and developers and from Adobe employees. My favorite part is selecting features to include. And of course, my least favorite task is identifying features that will be delayed until the next release. With all the great ideas for Flash, both the in and out lists get pretty long. One of the best ways for a feature to make the cut, however, is for it to open up new possibilities.

As an example, we get plenty of requests from customers for new gradients, new filters, and new blend modes. Each user had specific goals in mind and would champion a conical fill or the need for a directional blur. Honestly, we could have made Flash Player 10 all about filters if we had tackled each request individually. Luckily, a centralized team at Adobe created a fantastic technology, Adobe Pixel Bender (requires Flash Player 10), which lets us incorporate the ability for designers to add their own fills, blend modes, and filters to their SWF files instead of having to bake them into Flash Player.

This is exciting because with one feature we have essentially added an infinite number of filters without making users wait for another release or making Flash Player bigger. We can now concentrate on making the underlying technology better so creative people can make more and better filters without being tied to a Flash Player release. This feature gets even better, though, because Pixel Bender can do more than just image manipulation. It can do math computation, and when combined with other features, it can also do audio filters. It can do all this before the community has even touched the technology and extends it in ways we haven’t even thought of.

As you read about all the new features in Flash Player 10, keep in mind that each one has been designed to be a flexible multitasker in your arsenal of creative tools. I can’t wait to see how you use them.
Creative expression

In the following video, I talk about some of the new easy 3D effects you can work with.

Running time: 2:06
Custom filters and effects

You can create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used to power filters and effects in Adobe After Effects CS3 software. 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. Even for big effects, the code will be small; most filters are smaller than 1K, meaning you can use them with even the most stingy file budgets without bloating your application.

In addition to image filters and effects, Pixel Bender can be used to process other types of information. With new capabilities in sound, you can write live audio filters or just use the power of Pixel Bender’s number crunching engine to process data asynchronously in a separate thread.

Introducing Adobe Flash Player 10

Adobe Flash Player 10 meta-policy requirement

Policy files are not being read or permissions do not behave as expected.

The master policy file (the crossdomain.xml file located at the root of the server) determines the behavior of additional policy files. The master policy file must be in the correct location, contain some policies, and allow other policy files (by not using the “master-only” policy option).

Define a meta-policy for your domain. If you are using only a master policy file, Adobe still recommends that you define a meta-policy.

You can also manage policy files on a directory basis by setting up a master policy file that sets only a meta-policy. In this way, other policy files can be used without the master policy file declaring any specific permissions itself.

For example, suppose you control all the content on your server, and you are confident that unauthorized users cannot create a policy file on your server. In this case, you can use the meta-policy all, permitting any file on the server to be used as a policy file:

<cross-domain-policy>
	      <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="all"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

If you want to prevent unauthorized users from creating a policy file on your server, you can use the meta-policy by-content-type, permitting any file on the server with the content-type text/x-cross-domain-policy to be used as a policy file:

<cross-domain-policy>
	      <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="by-content-type"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

You can also declare a meta-policy using HTTP response headers. For more information, see the meta-policies section in “Policy file changes in Flash Player.”

Flash developers – Adobe Flash Player crashes when vieiwng Flash content

If internet Explorer consistently crashes when vieiwng Flash content, the crash may be the result of ActionScript code, system performance, and or memory allocation.

To optimize ActionScript code and prevent memory issues that may lead to a crash, delete variables when you no longer need them. While it is better to delete variables you no longer need, you can set unused variables to null to enhance performance.
Reporting a crash to Adobe

Developers should follow three steps to report a crash/freeze issue to Adobe:

1. Configure your system to create a Flash Player crash log and obtain the log.
2. Create a Flash Player public bug and submit the crash log via that bug.
3. Create a Flash Player support webcase pointing Adobe Support to your public bug.

Configure your system to create a Flash Player crash log (Windows XP or Vista)

1. Open notepad or another text editor:
2. Start> All Programs> Accessories> Notepad
3. Create a text file with one line: CrashLogEnable=1
4. Save the file as: c:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\mms.cfg
5. Generate a crash in Internet Explorer. Write down ALL URLs open at the time (windows or tabs).
6. Open a command line prompt. Select Start > Run and type cmd in the dialog.
7. Type cd “Local Settings\Temp” at the command line prompt. Be sure to include the quotation marks.
8. Type dir *.mdmp at the command line prompt. These are the log files.

Submit your crash log via the Flash Player public bugbase:

1. Point your browser to https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/
2. Choose Register/Create New Account.
3. Log in with your new account.
4. Choose “Create New Issue”.
5. Follow the steps to create a new Flash Player issue. The project should be “Flash Player” and the issue type “Bug”.
6. On the next page of the submission form, use the Attachment button to attach your crash logs to the public bug.

Note: Because Flash Player crash logs contain private information, bugs submitted will be private. After you submit the bug you will not be able to view the bug again. Please record the bug’s number and URL before closing.

Create an Adobe support case:

1. Submit an Adobe support ticket through the Adobe Support Portal for the product you are developing with. An AdobeID and login is required. Phone support is available for most development products as described above.
2. Include the information listed below to help us diagnose the crash.
1. System information (OS version, etc)
2. Browser information
3. Number of tabs open
4. URL
5. Reproduction steps
6. Link to the Flash Player public bug submitted above. This will take this form:

https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-99

NOTE: If for some reason you are unable to create a Flash Player public bug as described above, please attach .mdmp crash log files to your webcase.

NOTE: Crash-related bugs are immediately made private to prevent exposing your system information to the public. After filing the bug you will not be able to see it again. Please note the bug number.
7. When opening a developer-specific support case, please supply FLA/MXML source that reproduces the issue.

Adobe Flash Player 10: Internet Explorer crash or freeze

Internet Explorer crashes or freezes on Windows XP or Windows Vista. It displays the error message, “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem with an add-on and needs to close. The following add-on was running when this problem occurred: Flash10a.ocx”.

SOLUTION
Restart your computer, and open the web page again. Avoid opening too many Internet Explorer tabs or browser windows. Viewing multiple web pages at the same time can dramatically increase overall memory required to run the browser.

If the problem persists, download the latest Flash Player: Download Flash Player.

If the problem still occurs:

1. Contact the site owner if you can narrow the crash to a specific page.
2. Submit a public bug report with your crash information. For more information, see “Introducing the Flash Player bug and Issue Management System”.

Adobe Flash Player 10 and Mac OS X 10.6

The initial release of Mac OS X 10.6.0 (Snow Leopard) included a version of Flash Player earlier than the version currently available from Adobe.com. Apple has included a later Adobe Flash Player version in the Mac OS X v10.6.1 Update, but newer versions of Adobe Flash Player have been released.

Adobe recommends that all users update to the latest, most secure version of Adobe Flash Player at the Flash Player Download Center.

Fixing Flash Player Plugin for Internet Explorer

If you have been having issues getting the Flash Player Plugin to work in Internet Explorer 7 or 6, then I might have a solution that works…at least it did for me! I gathered the following steps from various Adobe technotes and have rearranged the order of them finally worked on my setup with Windows XP.

Go ahead and download the following files and save them in a folder so that you don’t have to open your browser until all steps are completed: (All links are to Adobe, Macromedia, or Microsoft for your ease of mind in knowing they’re legit)

1. Flash Player Uninstaller
2. SubInACL tool
3. reset_minimal.zip file
4. Install Flash Player 10 ActiveX.exe file from Adobe

Next, completely uninstall the Flash Player Plugin. This will remove the pesky Active X Control that seems to get in the way of getting Flash Player to work properly in Internet Explorer. The following instructions for completely removing the Flash Player Plugin is from technote kb402435 on Adobe’s site.

(You should have already downloaded this file from above….just place it in your root Local Disk folder…most likely C:\ ) Download the uninstaller for Flash Player from “How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control” (TechNote tn_14157). Note: The uninstall_flash_player.exe file must be saved to the same directory that the command window is in, for example C:\.

1. Select Start.
2. Select Run.
3. Type cmd
4. In the command window, type the following:
uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean
5. This will remove all entries in the system registry.

The next step was what seemed to do the trick for me. This is somewhat hidden on Adobe’s site as technote fb1634cb

Using the SubInAcL tool from Microsoft to fix permission issues in the registry has solved installation errors for several products including Flash Player.

Warning! The following solution involves the Windows System Registry. Editing or manipulating the registry incorrectly can result in serious system damage which may require reinstallation of the operating system. If you are not comfortable editing the registry, then take your system to a professional. If you choose to proceed, then it is essential that you create a complete system backup and a Windows System Restore Point before proceeding. Adobe Systems cannot be held responsible for damage resulting from this information.

You must have administrator privileges to successfully complete these instructions.

1. (If you downloaded the files above, you can skip this step) Follow the instructions to download the SubInACL tool from the Microsoft Download Center.
2. Install SubInACL.
3. (If you downloaded the files above, you can skip this step) Download the reset_minimal.zip file .
4. Extract the reset_minimal.cmd file to C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\.
5. *Important: Be sure that both the subinacl.exe and reset_minimal.cmd files are in the same location here: C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\.
6. Double-click reset_minimal.cmd.
7. This will open a command window and execute the SubInACL tool.
8. Do not use the machine while SubInACL is running.
9. When it is finished you will see “Press any key to continue”.
10. Install the Flash Player from www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

Once I did that, everything worked great in Internet Explorer 6!!! I then downloaded IE7 and installed it and everything continued to work perfectly. If these steps worked for you also, please share your success in the comment sections below. If you have another solution that works, please share that as well.

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