Adobe Flash Player 11 / Features

Stream beautiful video from your computer's camera with higher compression efficiency and industry-wide support, enabling both high-quality real-time communications (such as video chat and video conferencing) and live video broadcasts.

Protect streaming video across devices without the complexity of a license server. New Adobe Flash Access® features include key rotation support, V3 license chaining, domain support, enhanced output protection, and device filtering.

Deliver live streaming and real-time interactive video with improved playback performance and increased frame rates of high bit rate content running on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

Add real-time VoIP capabilities to games, enterprise, and other types of apps without requiring users to wear a noise-canceling headset. Users can chat using the speaker built into their desktop or laptop computer.

Deliver HD quality video up to 1080p that rivals today's best video codecs with On2 VP6, On2 VP6-S, and industry-standard H.264 in the most popular video format on the web through progressive download, HTTP streaming, or RTMP streaming.

Take advantage of the high-fidelity and open source Speex voice codec, which offers a low-latency alternative for voice encoding. Flash Player also supports ADPCM, HE-AAC, MP3, and Nellymoser.

Play back media protected using Flash Access in Flash Player to support a wide range of business models, including video on demand, rental, and electronic sell-through, for streaming as well as download.

Deliver video on demand and live multibitrate streaming using standard HTTP infrastructure and SWF-level playback components. Deliver live and recorded media, including full content protection for HTTP streamed video with Flash Access.

Take advantage of key rotation support, V3 license chaining, domain support, enhanced output protection, and device filtering features.

Support interoperability with legacy phone systems via the Flash Media Gateway (FMG) and other third-party clients (through the open RTMP protocol) without the need for transcoding.

Leverage complete hardware acceleration of the video rendering pipeline. Dramatically decrease processor usage, enable higher frame rates, reduce memory usage, and improve pixel fidelity for high-definition playback on mobile and desktop.

Take advantage of hardware-accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.

Use new sound APIs to reduce latency for high quality streaming audio playback. 

Deliver smooth, high-quality video with minimal overhead across supported devices. Hardware decoding offloads tasks from the CPU, improves video playback, reduces use of system resources, and preserves battery life.

Show exceptional video with streams that automatically adjust to changing network conditions. Flash Player is enhanced to improve switching times between bitrates.

Play RTMP streams through the buffer even if the connection is disrupted. Add reconnection logic in ActionScript to reestablish server connection and resume streaming without any disruption in the video.

Speed up the rendering of vectors, bitmaps, filters, and video, including true 1080p video, with multicore support that takes advantage of up to four CPUs.

Use the typed array class for better performance, efficiency, and error checking of data.

Achieve superb performance with complex applications; large data sets; and object-oriented, reusable codebases with ActionScript 3.0, based on the ECMAScript standard (ECMA-262).

Write a single error handler to process all runtime errors that were not part of a try/catch statement. Improve application reliability and user experience by catching and handling unexpected runtime errors, and present custom error messages.

Access binary data of the live and continuous waveform coming from the microphone to create new types of audio applications.

Use enhanced sound APIs to generate audio and create new types of audio apps such as music mixers and sequencers, real-time audio for games, or even audio visualizers. Process, filter, and mix audio in real time.

Perform runtime drawing more easily with restylable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Create innovative text controls with the new, highly flexible text layout engine, coexisting with TextField, which provides low-level access to text layout and interactivity APIs to create component-level text objects.

Add more power to your web application with direct byte access to binary data. Control and access data in new ways, such as adding support for new file and data types or manipulating sound data in real time to create new sound effects.

Manipulate bitmaps, copy vector data into bitmaps, and access bitmap effects at runtime.

Control what can be displayed in the context menu through the use of ActionScript APIs for common text field context menu items, supporting plain and rich text. The clipboard menu provides access to the clipboard in a safe and controlled way.

Reduce CPU load and improve battery life on mobile devices by using hardware to accelerate audio decoding, avoiding CPU-intensive parsing and decompression.

Use the hardware processing power of the graphics card to paint SWF files into the browser and accelerate compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software.

Engage users with hardware-accelerated, multicore-enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.

Enjoy fast, high-quality downscaling of images at runtime. Improve performance by reducing vector and graphic rendering through bitmap caching..

Enjoy increased performance and quality of anti-aliased text, particularly for Asian character rendering, with the enhanced Saffron anti-aliasing engine. Support for stroke fonts reduces memory requirements.

Take advantage of ActionScript 3.0 and the optimized AVM2 for rich Internet applications. AVM2 includes a JIT compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed while maintaining backward compatibility.

Reduce SWF file sizes and speed up app download times by building apps with common platform components, such as the open source Flex framework. Flash Player enables common components to be cached locally and then used by any SWF file from any domain.

Eliminate the dependency on different browser timer implementations to deliver consistent cross-platform behavior, lower CPU utilization and extend battery life. Play back video at any frame rate, increasing playback fidelity.

Deliver engaging content in a small file size thanks to the lightweight, binary SWF file format.

Reduce startup times for immediate user experiences. Flash Player executes SWF content as it downloads.

Create content that can be accessed in a consistent, reliable, backward-compatible, and secure manner across major operating systems and browsers. Reuse code, assets, frameworks, tools, and services to create apps, content, and video for desktop and mobile.

Design content with the latest features and target the majority of users within a matter of months. Rapid adoption of new releases of Flash Player enables developers to reach more users with cutting-edge technology.

Provide users with a smooth, in-context upgrade experience. Flash Player contains Express Install and Auto-Update Notification functionality for rapid adoption of new Flash Player releases that developers can target with confidence.

New versions of the runtimes can now be delivered more effectively to the end user with this enhanced updating mechanism for Windows and Mac OS.

ActionScript developers can now take advantage of high-performance native parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data. Developers can integrate existing data seamlessly into their projects.

A GC advice API provides additional control over the scheduling of garbage collection, so that the garbage collection process does not disrupt the user experience.

Support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard (International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-2) provides more efficient compression than JPEG, enables both lossy and lossless compression support, and adds support for alpha channel transparency.

Take advantage of LZMA compression to reduce SWF file sizes by up to 40%, enabling users to benefit from richer experiences with shorter download times and reduced bandwidth consumption.

DisplayObjectContainer now implements a removeChildren API allowing developers to quickly remove all of a container’s children using a single API call. 

Take advantage of the new MovieClip.isPlaying property, which returns the MovieClip's current playing state.

Improve management of data transfer with a new property to determine the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer and a new event for when data is being sent to the network layer.  New APIs allow apps to easily track progress and provide feedback.

Start in 2D then transform your animations into 3D. Simple-to-use APIs and 3D tools in Adobe Flash Professional software, enable motion that was previously accessible only to expert ActionScript® users or custom third-party libraries.

Add real-time dynamic effects for blur, drop shadow, glow, bevel, gradient glow, and more. Expand your creative options with blend modes, radial gradient, and strokes combined with custom filters and effects created using Pixel Bender technology.

Create real-time effects for cinematic experiences. With Pixel Bender, effects can be used both in production with Adobe After Effects® CS5 software and live with Flash Player. Apply unique filters, effects, and blend modes to all display objects.

Enjoy improved readability of text in Flash Player, especially for complex character-based languages.

Take advantage of the flexible text engine that brings print-quality publishing to the web. Gain more control over text layout using the open source Text Layout Framework, an extensible library to create multilingual web applications.

Input text using native device virtual keyboards with TextField support if no physical keyboard is detected. A virtual keyboard is automatically raised and lowered when editing text on mobile devices to enable unobstructed and intuitive text editing.

Define custom native mouse cursors, enabling user experience enhancements and improving performance.

Leverage accelerometer input for user input control and to control screen orientation. Read acceleration values in x, y, and z axes from native device accelerometer sensors, and specify the rate of accelerometer updates to conserve battery life.

Bring your designs to life with animation and compositing capabilities, such as support for alpha channels, masking, and layering. Create stunning motion graphics integrated with images and video.

Dynamically import GIF, progressive JPEG, and PNG files.

Deliver web applications with accurate color, so your favorite web destinations look the way they were intended. Color correction works with the monitor's ICC color profile and allows you to convert SWF files to standard RGB.

Manipulate large bitmaps up to 16,777,216 pixels (4096x4096) with a maximum length of 8191 pixels per side.

Developers can now take advantage of cryptographically secure random number generation to build more secure algorithms and protocols.

Take advantage of new support for secure communications in client/server applications.

Get more control over user privacy with a simple and integrated way to clear local storage from the browser’s privacy settings interface — similar to how users clear their browser cookies today.

Manage Flash Player privacy, security, and storage settings more easily with streamlined controls. Users can access the Flash Player Settings Manager directly from the Control Panel or System Preferences on Windows®, Mac, and Linux® computers.

Stay current more easily with new features and capabilities thanks to support for automatic notification of software updates on Mac OS.

Improve app responsiveness and deliver smoother animation by decoding images on initial load, instead of on demand. Images are cached as needed.

Leverage interoperability with existing custom protocols, and increase data transfer performance with a compact data representation.

Share data in real time between SWF files on the local computer or server.

Exchange binary data with the open, compact Action Message Format (AMF). Serialize ActionScript objects to persist and retrieve application states.

Communicate and share data between applications running on the same client.

Process text and lists and present information based on location context using operating system locale preferences or a specific format independent of the currently selected locale.

Bring users into the experience by letting them load and save files from your web application. New file reference runtime access allows local processing of data without roundtripping to the server.

Allow localized input by accessing operating system IMEs from within your application.

Allow users access to the clipboard in a safe and controlled way through the clipboard menu, so you can write handlers to paste text.

Use the host browser's "private browsing" mode so local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

Automatically prevent out-of-memory browser crashes by shutting down instances where a SWF file attempts to allocate more memory than is available on the device.

Integrate with your HTML, DHTML, and Ajax-based web applications through the external Flash Player API.

Take advantage of support for windowless mode (transparent and opaque). Windowless mode blends between SWF files and the HTML above and below the SWF content.

Provide support for keyboard users, deaf and hard-of-hearing users, and users with other disabilities. Flash Player provides support for accessibility through the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) API.

Create products and technology that implement the SWF, FLV/F4V, RTMP, and AMF specifications. Adobe provides easy access to these specifications for developers.

Leverage Adobe's support for open source activities, including the contributions to the ActionScript Virtual Machine for Tamarin, providing an open source Flex framework and supporting Linux distributions with Flash Player.

Request new features, report bugs, vote on bugs, and track status through the public Flash Player bug and issue management system.

Count on dramatically improved search results of dynamic web content and RIAs. Adobe is working with search industry leaders by providing optimized Flash Player technology to key partners.