Adobe just released the numbers for Flash Player 9, update 3 (9.0.115) in addition to the major player versions. 61.8% penetration for 9.0.115 in 3 months is almost twice as fast as Flash Player has updated in the past.

It is really exciting news when you think that the majority of Flash Players are now taking advantage of multi-core support, and can view H.264 content.

Adobe Image Foundation Toolkit Prerelease 2 is now live on Adobe Labs. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the AIF toolkit is the tool for creating your own filters for use with Flash Player Astro. The most exciting part of the refresh are two Flash-specific enhancements.

The toolkit can now produce bytecode files (.hbc for now). While you can’t do much with them right now, these are the compiled files that Flash Player will use to render the pixel shader. The other enhancement is support for some new filter features that are going to be supported in Flash. While they were originally not allowed in the Flash profile, you can now use conditionals to make more complex filters than before.

To see some of the filters that have already been built by the community, take a look at the Hydra Gallery.

Adobe has released an update to Flash Player 9 today (9.0.124.0). This is the April 2008 security release that I blogged about earlier. This is primarily a security release to address certain issues and maintain the high confidence level that developers and end users have always had in Flash Player.

As I mentioned before, there are changes in this player that can impact existing content. For the full details, please read the updated article on the Adobe Developer Connection.

Content changes are frustrating and inconvenient. We’ve tried very hard to secure Flash Player in ways that reduce the impact to our customers. Whenever possible, we make choices that minimize the need to recompile or re-work an application. In all of the issues except “JavaScript:” placed in unusual network APIs there is an available solution that can be implemented outside the SWF, whether that is through a crossdomain.xml, an HTML parameter or an implicit call to a socket policy server.

Also, if you haven’t been to the Flash Player Download Center in a while, we just completed our re-design with this release. The new look is designed to make the experience of downloading Flash Player easier and more consistent with other Adobe technologies.

While CNN covers presidential campaigns, news about the Flash Player election is sadly being lost. Polls are open and candidates are sitting there hoping for your vote. Write-in candidates are already lurking in the back of your mind waiting to be added to race!

“What race is this?” you ask?

Today, Flash Player has joined Flex and Blaze DS as participants in Adobe’s public bug tracking system. While it may not actually be a real campaign, it is certainly inspired by the democratic process. In addition to searching for and reporting new issues, you can vote on issue that are important to you and influence the decisions of what goes into the next Flash Player.

As a product manager, the real treat for me though is the feature request section. If there is something you want from Flash Player, be it a small enhancement or a major new feature, you can enter a request on the site. It is product management GOLD to be able to have direct numbers on what the community wants and why (if you leave comments).

My job is to understand and anticipate your challenges and the sort of work that you want to do and work within Adobe to make the best product we can to serve your needs. Right now I do this through customer visits, talking to people at conferences, monitoring trends in the industry, and doing lots of other behind-the-scenes things. Most of this type of data is qualitative and has proven to be a successful methodology through the history of Flash. However, every time I can get my hands on some quantitative data like a vote count on a feature request it means that I can do a reality check and make sure that we are really going the direction the community needs us to go.

So, do Flash Player (and me) a favor and Vote early, vote often!

Its been a while since I’ve done a Why It Works That Way. My apologies, it has been a busy time working on the new Flash Player and doing lots of things for Adobe Max.

One of the questions I’ve gotten a few times has been about security and BitmapData.draw. In Flash Player there are restrictions on BitmapData.draw to prevent content theft. Recently, a “workaround” was found for the restriction on snapshotting RTMP content (streamed video). Unfortunately, one person’s workaround is another’s exploit or bug.

To maintain the protection on streamed content, the bug that enabled the workaround was closed as of Flash Player 9.0.115. However, the Flash Player and Flash Media Server teams recognize the benefits of the functionality and so we’ve created a way to keep the protections while allowing content owners to relax permissions when they want.

This new permissions system for RTMP snapshotting is a two-part solution. It requires a change in Flash Player and also a change in Flash Media Server. The change in player went out this week. On the same day, Adobe announced Flash Media Server 3. Content streamed through the new server can have a flag added that Flash Player 9.0.115 can recognize and then permit the snapshotting code to run.

I apologize for the inconvenience that you may experience during the time between Flash Player 9.0.115 launching and the launch of Flash Media Server 3, but I hope you agree that having the functionality as an actual supported feature is a good thing for building applications.

As a rule of thumb though, using workarounds for security or protection features is not a good idea. You can generally count on the workaround being closed in the next release of the player. The good news is that Adobe listens to its community and we try to provide new solutions that let you do what you want in a supported and safe way.

Future WIWTWs:
If there is a question you want me to ask about the inner workings of Flash Player or ActionScript, go to this page and submit a comment. I’d like to keep comments on this post relevant to the post itself.

I’ve had several questions since we launched Flash Player 9.0.115.0 about what new APIs need to be called to play back H.264 video. The short answer is that you don’t need to do anything to use H.264 other than have the new player and some H.264 content.

Well, that is pretty much the long answer too. The cool thing though is that you just don’t need to re-build your SWFs at all. If you have a video player SWF that is exported for Flash Player 7, it can play H.264 media files just the same as it can play FLV files. The “magic” is all in the new player.

I think some of the confusion comes in the form of just what the heck a compatible H.264 file is. There are a few topics that when I try to wrap my brain around them, I feel less informed than when I started. During the development process for 9.0.115, I added video to that list. Let me try and explain what I’ve learned so far in hopes that you can avoid some of the confusion I was suffering from.

Up until this version of Flash Player, we supported two codecs (Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6). Both of these were packaged in an FLV container (how the video bits are organized in a file). Now we have added support for a new codec, H.264, but we require that H.264 content to be in an Mpeg 4 container.

The good news is that this is a really common configuration. Many .mov, .3Gp, and .M4V files are H.264 content in MP4 containers. However, there are times where a .mov file or .m4v file may contain something different. In those cases, Flash Player can’t do anything with them. If you are encoding your files it is pretty easy to get it encoded correctly, but if you are working with already encoded content, the easiest way to see if the file is compatible is to just try playing it in Flash Player and see if it plays back.

Now, if all of that about video codecs and container types (file formats) made sense, thanks for reading, but please stop now. I don’t want to bring yopu back into confusion. For those that are still scratching their heads, let me try a metaphor.

Let’s say that I wanted to communicate the concept of “hello” from a server down to a SWF. The concept gets “encoded” into the English word “hello.” If I had chosen to speak Spanish, I could encode the concept into language as “hola.” Think of this choice as the codec. I started with a raw mental concept of a greeting and chose either an English or Spanish codec.

Now, I need to get that actual word down to a running SWF. That could be through XML or it could be through AMF (remoting). Either way I am sending the English word “hello” but for the SWF to correctly process it and use it in the application I need to serialize the data in a format like XML:

<message>hello</message>

This XML wrapper is like the MP4 file format where FLV might be something more like AMF. Both are great but you can’t use them interchangeably.

For bonus points, There are also things called “profiles” of H.264. Flash Player supports a lot of them, but if you want to extend the metaphor above, a profile is like the character encoding of the text. The concept is still the same, it is still English, and it still will be delivered in HTML, but the way the system turns the characters back into the specific characters h-e-l-l-o is different.

If that last bit lost you don’t worry, you’ll probably get a deeper dive on it should you run into the issue head first. Luckily as a Flash developer that should be a rare case since Flash Player supports such a wide range of profiles.