Pre-MAX News: Flash Player 10.1 Is A New Milestone

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Here’s the first half of Stefan’s article.

Overview
I’m not quite sure where to start, but I’ll have a try:
Flash Player 10.1 can be labeled as a ‘real’ fully featured Flash Player for mobile. It contains a lot of optimisations as well as new APIs that are directly aimed at breaking open the mobile device market for Flash – I think it’s safe to say that the time for Flash on mobile has finally come.

Flash Lite was always somewhat of a watered down version of the real thing, and its install and launch process was not the most user friendly. Now that devices are becoming more powerful it’s possible to bring a real Flash Player to mobiles. This means that rather than being a standalone Player into which you load a SWF you will be able to access web pages with embedded SWFs as you normally would on your desktop.

Performance Improvements
The new Player contains a lot of features that take device constraints into consideration, for example it includes performance improvements such as rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations, in addition to hardware acceleration of graphics and video. Improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage, and rendering/scripting performance benefit PCs as well as mobile devices. Flash Player 10.1 is new in that way – it is no longer just a desktop player, nor is it specially developed for mobile. Instead it combines the two and contains optimisations for mobile device playback.

HTTP Streaming Support
In Flash Player 10.1, you will also be able to load video through HTTP Streaming, which lets you take a video and convert it into many fragments that Flash Player can download individually with the help of new components. These fragments can be stored on any web server and do not require specialized hardware. This solution provides a greater amount of random access to the video than progressive loading does.

Stefan talks about Hardware Acceleration, Multi-touch and more, FMS 3.5.3 and RTMFP (with multicast) You can read the rest of the article here.