Flash Player 10.1 RC4 released

Adobe Labs has released their fourth Release Candidate of Flash Player 10.1 with hardware acceleration in Windows for H.264 video format.

The release of the final version of Flash Player 10.1 appears to be closer than ever before.  Adobe put a fourth RC version online last week, with one of the new functions of this player being the support of hardware acceleration when decoding H.264 videos.

Support of this has been announced for the Windows operating system with drivers adapted to Windows XP (32-bit), Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit). The compatible graphics cards are Radeon HD 4xxx (and higher), Mobility Radeon HD 4xxx (and higher), Radeon HD 3xxx (and higher), FirePro V3750 / V7750 / V8700 / V8750 for AMD/ATI, the ION platforms and GeForce and Quadro based cards for NVIDIA. For Intel, the IGP GMA 500, 4xxx and those integrated into the Intel Core processors (Intel HD Graphics) are compatible.

While there is no mention of hardware acceleration for Linux, Mac OS X 10.6.3 (version minimum) user’s can still use the Gala code named Flash Player which we have already written about in various news articles. After the release of the final version of Flash Player 10.1, an update will be made available for Mac OS X integrating Gala.

Flash Player 10.1 will also offer better Flash cookies controls, displaying to a user whether a Web page containing Flash content has already been visited. These cookies can be deleted through the Flash Players settings which will take you to an Adobe website, although this isn’t possible directly through the browser. Google Chrome, for example, offers a link to the Adobe web site in their Confidentiality and Advanced Options, allowing you to configure the Flash Player’s storage options.

With the increased integration of private browsing in web browsers, this Flash Player cookie management has been widely criticized. It would be preferable for Adobe to store Flash Player 10.1 cookies in a temporary folder, deleting these when a private browsing session has ended.

Download Flash Player 10.1 RC4 ( 10.1.53.38 )