I was fully prepared for Flash Player 10 to be totally underwhelming, but it looks as though Adobe has gotten things right this time around.

After looking at the beta back in July, the new features - 3d effects, hardware acceleration, custom filters and effects - intrigued me. I also noted a slight improvement in performance on my workstation. You can view a full list of v10's features on Adobe's web site and try out some of them in an interactive demo.

The 3d draggable DVD case demo is interesting, but far from a perfect illustration of the new capabilities. Take a few seconds and flip it, and you'll notice the cover reappearing on the back and sometimes the bottom edge of the case. I don't doubt that the effects will improve with time, and it's still a promising start.

I'd like to see a more practical demo of the custom filters than what Adobe offers. Call me crazy, but I don't see much use in being able to watch a video clip with a mosaic or spherize filter applied. In the three months between the beta and final release, I expected a demo with a bit more impact.

What I didn't expect was Flash Player 10 actually making my MSI Wind and its piddly Atom CPU capable of finally watching stutter-free FLV clips on the web. Thanks to the new dynamic streaming quality of service abilities and the general performance enhancements, playback is silky smooth even on my underpowered netbook.

Overall, v10 is impressive, and reminds me how exciting Flash was when it first burst onto the scene. It's well worth the download.

Download Squad originally told you about the Adobe Flash beta in May, and yesterday Adobe announced further updates to "Astro." So what do you have to look forward to?

From a viewer's standpoint, there are several new features of interest. Tops among them: advanced 3d effects - that's right, Flash now supports shaders. Web gamers rejoice, because this no doubt means a whole new era of addictive browser-based gaming.

Sound APIs have been refined as well, which should provide a boost not only for games, but also for streaming media applications. Also along these lines, Flash 10 support dynamic bitrate adjustments. Translation: it'll adapt to crappy network conditions automatically so that your video doesn't get all choppy.

Adobe has just made the prerelease version of Flash Player 10 available for download. Almost as impressive as the player itself is the fact that the beta is available for Windows, OS X AND Linux (including Ubuntu support)!

For the full list of features and known issues, check out the release notes, but some of the highlights are:

• New text engine
• Ubuntu OS support
• Custom filters and effects
• Large bitmap support

Adobe's demo page for Flash Player 10 is pretty impressive; we especially liked the inverse kinematic and native 3D demos.

Adobe recommends uninstalling previous versions of Flash Player before installing 10 beta. Downloads are available here.

Thanks Evan!

At long last, Adobe has released the final version of Flash Player 9 for Linux. The first beta version was released back in October, and today is the first time in a long time the Linux player has been caught up to the Windows version. The version released is x86 only, and there's no word on whether a 64-bit version is on its way. Rumor over at Slashdot is that Adobe's Penguin.SWF blog is rejecting negative comments, which sits poorly with me. If Adobe is really embracing Flash on Linux--as would seem to be indicated by the very existence of its Flash-on-Linux blog--they should be addressing the community's concerns directly, not burying them.

Nevertheless, I'm sure some Linux users are thrilled to have an up-to-date Flash player in their browser, if nothing else for watching YouTube. Linux users, please share your experiences with the new plugin in the comments. You can download the Flash Player 9 for Linux on Adobe's download page.

At long last, Linux users can finally get a version of Flash Player 9 that runs natively in their OS. Yesterday Adobe released a beta version of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Linux users have been waiting a very long time indeed for this release, having suffered with Flash Player 7 for years while Windows and Mac users got to play with Flash Player 8 and then 9.

So, have any of our Linux brethren tried this new Flash for Linux yet? Is it all it's cracked up to be, or a day year late and a dollar short?

[Via Slashdot]

More than one blogger on the Download Squad team has privately bemoaned the fact that while Flash Player for Windows is up to version 9 (which includes handy features like multiple simultaneous file uploads), Flash Player for Linux has been stuck for some time at version 7. Believe it or not, Adobe hasn't forgotten about you Linux folk, and there's an entire team dedicated to bringing Flash up to speed on Linux. ZDNet's Ryan Stewart has an interview with Mike Melanson, the leader of that team, about the state of Flash Player for Linux. Melanson talks about the Flash for Linux team ("Of course, we're not making cheese sandwiches here. Throwing more programmers, any programmers, at the problem will not necessarily speed the process along."), the challenges of porting Flash Player 9 to Linux ("selecting APIs that have broad coverage across distributions"), and the mysterious absence of a Linux version of Flash Player 8. He paints a very optimistic picture of the future of Flash on Linux. You can read all about the team's progress (which looks to be pretty significant) on their official blog, cheekily named Penguin.SWF.

Google has started dropping some tests of their streaming video ads and video content from the recent deal with Viacom's MTV Networks.

The deal sees MTV Networks providing content for the ads that will run in place of Google's AdWords on websites. Through the ads, Viacom can showcase clips of such premium programs as SpongeBob SquarePants, Laguna Beach, The Real OC, and the MTV Video Awards.

There were a handful of publishers that were chosen to be included into the beta test of the program, and one of them has provided a link to where their test is occurring. The document that was provided to publishers explained that Google's Streaming Video Content and Ads enable website publishers to display streaming video ads and video content from MTV Networks on their sites. Publishers were instructed that they will get the specific JavaScript that will embed a Flash player into their website. The ad will still be served off of Google's servers and viewers of the ad must have the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed in order to view the streaming content.

Revenue for these ads is generated on a CPM basis depending on the number of views on each ad in the content. So if someone watches the whole video and sees five ads, the publisher will be paid for those five views. If no ad is seen by the user, there will be no payment for the ad. Revenue from the ad will be split between the content provider, Google and the publisher.

[via Google System]

This one slipped under my radar: Last week Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Windows. New Flash Player releases are never really earth-shattering, but this bit in the press release caught my eye: "Flash Player 9 achieves up to 10 times faster performance through ActionScript 3.0 and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), which features a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed." Though your average Flash animation doesn't use much ActionScript, many games and other more interactive movies do, and some developers have complained abou thte speed in ActionScript in previous versions. Also new is capabilities for the brand new Flex 2 framework and some other features that will be of interest mainly to developers, but which will benefit end-users in the long run. For Mac users, Flash Player 9 is in beta and can be downloaded at the same site (meanwhile, Linux users are still stuck with Flash Player 7).

[Via Netscape]