Emmy Huang

Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player

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December 03, 2007

Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9.0.115.0) now available

Flash Player 9 Update 3, with H.264 support, is now available from the download center.

This was a ginormous release for us, and for you. This release brings:
* New audio/video options with H.264/HE-AAC codec support
* Improved Performance through multi-core support for rendering, hardware scaling in full-screen, multi-threaded video decoding, a new algorithm for image scaling, and the Flash Player cache for local caching of common platform components to reduce SWF sizes and app loading times
* Support for full-screen mode for Linux
* MSAA Accessibility support for the plugin
* Mac OS X Leopard support
* And bug fixes

WHEW!

Resources
* Take a look at our updated product page! We've got the new logo, an updated look and feel, and an updated datasheet. The feature demo has also been updated to include an H.264 video clip and full screen demo.
* Press Release
* Release Notes
* Check the Dev Center for new articles and updates
* Check the support center for new Technotes

Posted by ehuang at December 3, 2007 09:29 PM

Trackback Pings

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Comments

Hi Emmy,

We're testing express install with this new plugin and sometimes receive:
"There was an error downloading the Flash Player update. Please try again later, or visit adobe.com/go/getflashplayer/ to download the latest version of the Flash plugin."

Also, we did get it installed that way on a Mac, and rather than doing the update in-browser it downloaded and ran an updater. Is this a new behavior, since it seems annoying for people to update this way.

Thanks!

Posted by: Miles at December 3, 2007 10:32 PM

Congrats!

Posted by: John Lin at December 3, 2007 11:11 PM

@Miles
We just pushed the bits so there might be a caching or propagation network issue. But, there is no specific error that has that text...that sounds like you are combining two error messages? One from the player and one from the express installer?

The Mac behavior has always been that way. There is a UI and user involvement and we are looking to improve it.

Posted by: Emmy at December 3, 2007 11:31 PM

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/jchurch_flashplayer9.html

"Regardless of the number of processors your computer has, you *can enable* other enhancements such as improved image downscaling."

Is that mean, that there is API to enabling/disabling this feature?

Posted by: maliboo at December 4, 2007 08:54 AM

Any idea when the updated file format spec will be available?

Posted by: Lee at December 4, 2007 12:27 PM

Hello Emmy,

Found this sentence on Ryan Stewart's blog. I've been looking to confirm ever since...

"The second announcement is about Flash Media Server 3. Flash Media Server 3 (FMS 3) is going to be the release that supports H.264 streaming (unfortunately the only way to get H.264 content to the player)."

Does this mean that Flash Player 9.0.115.0 has support for H.264 content but only if it's streaming via FMS 3?

Posted by: tom at December 4, 2007 03:50 PM

Congrats, great release. I will try the H.264 (I assume that the progressive download does not require any specific server, right?).

Posted by: Jeremy Chone at December 4, 2007 04:18 PM

@maliboo - no, we should clarify that. There is no API, the downscaling is "available" to you. It is the mipmapping algorithm that improves the performance of image scaling.

@Lee - I don't have a schedule for this yet - we're working on the update to add the F4V file format. There aren't any other changes.

@Tom - Flash Player supports progressive download and streaming *through FMS*. In other words, at this point in time streaming of H.264 is through RTMP/FMS only.

Posted by: emmy at December 4, 2007 04:30 PM

Hi,

It's great to see the H.264/HE-AAC support so well done :)

One major point tho, from both a user and developer perspective, I really think the minor number issue of Flash Player updates is confusing and unhelpful i.e. 9.0.115.0 for Update 3!

In future how about a more simple dot one release versioning for each update e.g. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3

Trying to explain to my users whether they have Flash Player 9.0.115.0 is too difficult at present but it is the only way for me to work out if they have H. 264 support.

And the version number really should come up on a right-click on a SWF e.g. "About Adobe Flash Player 9.3..." rather than the existing "About Adobe Flash Player 9..."

That way, users can tell instantly what version of the Player they have installed.

Sure 9.0.115.0 makes sense to the Flash Player team but to everyone else, it is confusing.

Maybe you could address this in Flash Player 10?

Cheers,

Adrian

Posted by: Adrian at December 4, 2007 05:26 PM

@ adrian. Mind reader. ;-) Yes, we know it is confusing. It's a legacy thing, and to be honest this is one of the first times we've blown our versioning by adding so many features into a 'dot release'.

But no more. Yes, the plan for Flash Player 10 is to use a sensible dot release scheme, where we utilize the second dot. 10.0, 10.1, 10.3, etc. and 3rd dot for bugfixes only.

Posted by: emmy at December 4, 2007 05:35 PM

What about Debug version, will it be available any soon?

Posted by: Oleg at December 5, 2007 02:35 AM

Can you tell us where to get the debug version of the new player?

Posted by: polyGeek at December 5, 2007 08:26 AM

Debug version ->
www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Posted by: pic_micro at December 5, 2007 11:51 AM

I second Adrian's thoughts on

"...And the version number really should come up on a right-click on a SWF e.g. "About Adobe Flash Player 9.3..." rather than the existing "About Adobe Flash Player 9..."

Please ensure it is placed in the context menu so that users can know exactly which version they have,

Thanks.

Posted by: William from Lagos at December 6, 2007 06:32 AM

FlashPlayer 9.0.115.0 will be turning on auto-update notifications?

Posted by: Cotton at December 6, 2007 11:28 AM

hd gallery- full screen movies are scaled poorly. when will you fix the primitive ugly scaling in flash editor and player?

Posted by: rado at December 7, 2007 12:50 AM

Hi Emmy,

We believe we found a bug in this. I posted in
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=616&threadid=1321424&enterthread=y

Is there a way to get in touch with Deneb Meketa?

We are running large TCP servers with flash clients that use XMLSocket to connect, so this is fairly important for our users.

Thanks!

Posted by: SutroStyle at December 9, 2007 12:42 AM

Its nice to see these improvements being made. Its also nice to see that you're still making new releases for linux.

Too bad the incredibly annoying and longstanding bug in the linux flash player that makes it crash when browsing away from sites that have flash videos is still there. I was hoping you guys were going to fix that bug in this release. Having to kill and restart firefox every couple minutes when I want to watch videos on youtube tends to get very old very fast.

Posted by: Ryan at December 11, 2007 07:43 PM

Could I just ask why the performance in the final release is so much worse than in the previous 2 beta versions.
I've only seen a handful of posts about this and no firm reply, which I find really weird.

With the beta's we were getting desktop speeds in the browser, now we're not.
As a game developer it's a major blow to be perfectly honest, esp. after spending time on current projects giving them features which would be triggered when run in the latest version of the player where there was to speed to do it.

It just seems really odd to have a beta(s) running at a high speed, and starting to build to that speed, only to have it taken away again.

Thanks.

Posted by: Squize at December 12, 2007 04:43 AM

Hey Emma--this is awesome! Very exciting... Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but are there plans to enable keyboard input in full screen in FP? I know about the phishing risks, but a prompt like with mic/camera would work great...?

Posted by: Drew at December 12, 2007 10:23 PM

@cotton - We usually delay a bit to make sure there aren't any major issues before we turn on the update notification. But the new bits are on the server so anyone updated by content will get the latest.

@ rado - i have to look into that content

@ SutroStyle - sounds like a bug, we've filed it based on your forum post

@ ryan - can you file a bug with details?

@ Squize - I've filed a bug - you're right.

@ Drew - we're investigating what we can do to balance functionality with the security/privacy concerns.

Posted by: emmy at December 13, 2007 03:43 PM

I second Ryan's issue about the radically reduced performance of 9.0.115 versus 9.0.47.

Using a Papervision3D project as an example, whereas I get 50fps using 9.0.47, I get 30fps with the "official" 9.0.115 version.

You mentioned filing a bug - how do we go about doing that?

Posted by: JCCAUSEY at December 14, 2007 08:36 PM

great new features, but too bad we also get new bugs for the linux version.

-fullscreen youtube popsup a small window with no controls and on minimize it disapears.

-performance not very good compared to v9.0.48 in fullscreen youtube, veoh or playing games like dofus.

-still the flash on top of javascript objects bug.

you guys are just too important for the linux community i hope these things can be sorted out.

am using ubuntu gutsy and firefox 2.0.0.11

i'll be using 9.0.48 for now, still has some bugs but is still very usable

Posted by: manny at December 16, 2007 09:12 AM

Emmy, We are a medium size site (Alexa under 10,000). The fact that we now need to download socket policy file via the socket rather than via http (every socket connection), has increased our bandwidth by 4Mbps, which is approximately $250/month. This is because this policy file is not cacheable by the browser, unlike before. I imagine for a company like Youtube the increase will be far more significant.

Posted by: SutroStyle at December 16, 2007 04:35 PM

Loving all the new updates, great work from the team. Is there any chance or methodology i can't think of to put in DRM protection for videos into the flash player without using Adobe Media Player?

Posted by: Ade at December 17, 2007 03:44 AM

I have noticed some really good results for the rendering speed with the new player on a dual core, near up to twice the speed ... wow : http://www.tekool.net/blog/2007/12/17/moviestar-rendering-up-to-twice-the-speed-with-a-dual-core/

Thanks for the work.

Posted by: Tek at December 17, 2007 03:18 PM

hd gallery- full screen movies are scaled poorly. when will you fix the primitive ugly scaling in flash editor and player?
Thanks!

Posted by: dimiril at December 20, 2007 06:50 AM

After upgrade from 9.0.48 into 9.0.115 I run into problems, where my all browsers crashing when trying to show flashs. Using Centos 5 distro and vanilla 2.6.23.12 kernel.
Had to downgrade back into 9.0.48 version. Have read similar problems from others too.
Oh, browsers are Firefox, Konqueror, Opera... Any cure in sight?

****
Hi,

We don't officially support Centos, but you can file a bug here:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=fp_beta_feedback

It may be due to the new XEmbed support that is required for the plugin, so you will need to check that the browser version you have installed is able to support XEmbed for Flash Player.

emmy
*****

Posted by: jarmo at December 25, 2007 10:35 PM

Great, from where can I download the 64-bit Linux version :-(

Posted by: troll at December 30, 2007 11:34 AM

So, i'm really bored with Flash Player on mac os X, it burns my knees with my MacBookPro! The same animation (generally a FLV video) on the same machine on Windows XP and everything is going smoothly and at a reasonable CPU consumption.

Could you please do something for Mac OS X platform ? I'm not alone, and I'm still wondering how this BIG issue will be solved.

Cheers,
B

Posted by: bitonio at December 31, 2007 01:10 PM

Hi Emmy,
I'm currently running Flash Player 9.0.115.0 but still experiencing the 'stop() on first frame' problems mentioned in the 9.0.45.0 update.

I experience the problem when movieclips are added using classes from external swfs.

Heres what happens:
- SWF A loads SWF B
- SWF A then adds a new Asset1() from SWF B using ApplicationDomain
- Asset1 has a movieclip within it called box_mc
- box_mc has a stop() on the first frame ...but it doesn't stop or trace().

Here is an example: http://www.thirstboards.com/StopExample3.zip

Any advice??

Thanks :)

****
Jarrod - I've sent this to QE and they will take a look. If you have additional bugs, please file them here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=fp_beta_feedback

best,
Emmy
*****

Posted by: Jarrod at January 8, 2008 03:52 PM

9.0.115 does not work on Opera and Konqueror (Linux).

9.0.48 and 9.0.115 crash browser from time to time when navigating away from a page with Flash content.

Where I can download 9.0.48 gzipped tarball from? I'd like to downgrade.

Posted by: VAT at January 19, 2008 02:07 PM

Hello Emmy,
support for more media codecs is great, performancewise i have the same results as Squize (so beta player performance was way better than release player´s performance is), which is a bummer (especially since i worked a long while on stuff using the better performance of the beta player and had to cut that back now).

Anyway, the actual reason why i´m writing is that i´ve of course seen the Max presentation where you showd some of the upcoming flash 10 features and there that textfield enhancment demos.
I´m right now working on a flash cms/wysiwyg frontend and its very frustrating to have to fight with all the limitations and bugs of textfields. Especially html rendering/editing functionality is very limited.
I wonder if you´re working on more html rendering in textfields and which other plans are up there for textfields. So yeah, please write more on this as soon as you can :)

Posted by: Ugur at January 22, 2008 06:11 PM

I Experienced a MAJOR issue this morning with the flash player updater (windows XP).Going from vs 9.0.47 to 115.

After the updater ran, no flash content published for Flash player 9 would show up, however older content (v7 or so) did appear to work.

I am working amoungst a sea of MS developers on a very high profile, very high budget project involving alot of custom flash application development, streaming media, etc. I really need some help explaining to our (Anti-Adobe)development manager what happend to the flash player activeX control today after this update.

I was able to get the plugin to work only after uninstalling the activeX control and resinstalling 9.0.115.

This would never work in a production environment, as many of our end users would simply abandon this project.

Is this really the state of affairs with flash player and Microsoft? Can anyone offer any advice in defense of Flash? Has anyone else experienced this issue?

******

Casey,

If the uninstaller fixes your issue, this indicates that the permissions on the registry keys for Flash Player may have been incorrect - either they were set by some other software or possibly corrupted. If you have another machine that exhibits this issue, don't attempt the install and contact me so that I can have someone in tech support investigate.

thanks,
e
*****

Posted by: casey stalnaker at January 25, 2008 09:14 AM

On 24 January I got a Flash player update notification on my desktop immediately after boot-up; no Flash content was open nor were any browsers.

As I understand the Adobe website, "Flash Player never runs in the background to perform the auto-update check."

So was this a legitimate update notification? And is Flash player now running in the background to check for updates?

Many thanks!

Posted by: Helena at January 30, 2008 09:03 PM

I have an application that throws an exception with the new version of the Player. The exception is: 2012 _____ class can't be instantiated. It worked fine until now. Same problem in both Firefox and IE.

Any suggestions? Unfortunately, the error docs don't give any explanatory info about this error number.

****
Hi Ephraim,

Can you file a bug?

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=fp_beta_feedback

thanks,
e
****

Posted by: Ephraim at February 2, 2008 08:50 AM

Hi,

I encounter this weird issue recently.

When using the express install method to upgrade the flash player on "Vista / IE7" and "XP / IE6", it goes and REBOOTS the whole computer... Without asking anything.

The problem was recurrent on several computers.

The strange part is that the website doing the express install would display after reboot, but none of the flash on others websites...

The other websites seems not to detect the flash player.

Any clue ?

Posted by: Laurent at February 6, 2008 07:58 AM

It's hard to believe that this hasn't been found, and maybe we're doing something wrong, but if you follow these instructions:
http://www.adobe.com/resources/richmedia/tracking/designers_guide/index.html

And publish as version 8 or 9, the click doesn't work (using flash player 9). If you publish as version 7, it works. I've tested this on Windows XP, 2k with IE6,7 and Firefox 2. Has anyone else seen or reported this? Is this really a bug?

Posted by: Bill Burns at February 7, 2008 10:00 AM

Hey Emmy,

On Jan 24th I reported an issue with the Flash player updater that resulted in what seems to be a bad install. (dual core 2.93Ghz, 3.25G RAM, XP)

This happened again, this time one of our MS developers experienced the problem after proceeding with the stand alone FP Update dialogue.

This is the same scenario as described in my previous posting. This installation remains in its broken condition though I dont know how long I can keep it this way, since we all need to keep working.

You wanted me to "contact you so that you can have someone in tech support investigate."...what does that mean tho?

Posted by: casey stalnaker at February 12, 2008 10:24 AM

"On 24 January I got a Flash player update notification on my desktop immediately after boot-up; no Flash content was open nor were any browsers.

As I understand the Adobe website, "Flash Player never runs in the background to perform the auto-update check."

So was this a legitimate update notification? And is Flash player now running in the background to check for updates?

Many thanks!

"
ditto, xept it happens every time there is an update. I DO NOT want this happening, it just prolongs start up when I don't need it and I need to do something else, which is irritating. How do I stop this?

Thanks,
M

****
Hi,

You are correct - It doesn't run in the background. The auto-update check runs when FP is running (you are in your browser, you have flash content loaded, and it's past your 30 day check time, or whatever you set at default) and sets the notification dialog to run on next startup (after reboot). The reason is that the user is less likely to have any applications open that will be using Flash Player, since we are unable to update if the player is loaded in memory. In older players, you would have seen a dialog telling you to reboot your machine to complete the update, so we transitioned to running the notice on startup.

If you are on the latest version of the player (check to make sure you have the most secure release!), you shouldn't see the dialog every time. I'm not really clear why you are seeing this dialog everytime you start your machine? In the dialog, you have the option to install now, remind later, or don't install. There are also links to the settings manager to change your notification configuration.

You can change the default check time or turn off the notification on the settings manager: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager05.html#118377

****

Posted by: maciej at February 13, 2008 01:22 PM

Hi again Emmy -
First off, thanks so much for being so attentive to the problems being reported here. I indicated a problem a couple of weeks ago, and you had a tech support rep in touch with me within an hour! Thanks again!

Unfortunately, due to a bunch of serious non-disclosure agreements that I am bound to a present, I was forbidden to allow the support staff there at Adobe to connect to my machine to help diagnose. That was frustrating, but my hope is that someone else out there will be able to allow this type of help.

That said, the original issue remains, and I do have some follow up information for the community (this issue specifically relates to IE7 on XP and Vista, btw):

The problem:
After updating Flash Player, either from the stand-alone installer - or by using the "express install" feature of SWFObject 1.5 (a recent discovery of mine) – sometimes Flash Player 9 content does not display. It basically looks like Flash is not installed at all.

There is a very long post over at deconcept.com on this same issue located here:
http://blog.deconcept.com/2006/12/08/corrupt-flash-player-install-after-ie-7-upgrade/

This tells me that this is most definitely not an isolated problem. It’s in the wild, MS/IE7 ActiveX is the problem, and it’s prevalent on a lot of IE browsers.

I was able to take a couple of tips from the rep, and I did confirm that the necessary registry keys were present on my machine after the update. For the record, these are the keys to check:
Check for all 9 of these registry keys:
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash
through
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.9

And also check for these:
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{D27CDB70-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{D27CDB6B-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}

The only solution out there at this time is to completely uninstall flash player and then reinstall from Adobe. This is no solution though, as the majority of end-users are not savvy, and really makes anyone who is considering leveraging flash player on IE think twice.

I am resisting the urge to exclaim that MS is officially attempting to sabotage Flash (much like Java/Netscape in the 90’s), but it definitely looks like this is a real case of MS monopolizing the desktop/browser market place. Yikes.

Please keep me/us posted on any new developments with this issue; I will be following your blog closely!
Thanks again, you are doing a great job Emmy!

Posted by: casey stalnaker at February 18, 2008 07:40 AM

On 24 february I got a Flash player update notification on my desktop immediately after boot-up; no Flash content was open nor were any browsers.

As I understand the Adobe website, "Flash Player never runs in the background to perform the auto-update check."

So was this a legitimate update notification? And is Flash player now running in the background to check for updates?

Posted by: jack at February 22, 2008 12:44 PM

I downloaded Flash Player ver. 9.0.115.0 using Internet Explorer running on Windows XP. The URL indicated a successful download. However, after that I saw no Flash Player icon on my desktop, so I looked at the Flash Player folder using Windows Explorer, but there was nothing inside the folder nor subfolders, each one indicating 0 bites. Apparently Flash Player didn't actually install as indicated by the URL. I really don't know what to do, because I tried to install it several times with negative results. Please advise.

****
Hi Grant,
Please open a ticket with tech support at www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer
****

Posted by: Grant W. Johnson at February 24, 2008 03:15 PM

Emmy,

I would like to know if Adobe is aware about the audio timeline bug that has appeared in flash 9.0.115.0?
Apps that worked fine with .47 is now not even close to working. Audio playback and syncing seems to be issues. Is this known? Is there any patches on the way? This is important stuff for us and all our workaround attempts have been fruitless up til now.
Please advise,
thanks
Nick.

Posted by: Nick at February 25, 2008 02:08 AM

Hi Folks,

If you have an install issue, please open a ticket at www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer

If you have a potential bug, please report it to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=fp_beta_feedback (yes, I know it says beta feedback, but this form is better than the www.adobe.com/go/wish form for collecting info we need).

thanks,
Emmy

Posted by: emmy at February 25, 2008 01:49 PM

Hi Emmy,

i got a small problem. We running a icecast server with provides a 32kbit AAC-HEv2 stream.
The New Flashplayer can open the files without problem but as stream it don´t work. we tried with booth headers : audio/m4a and aac standard audio/aacp on the streaming server also different file extensions. but no one worked.

-sample code--
var connect_nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
connect_nc.connect(null);
var stream_ns:NetStream = new NetStream(connect_nc);
stream_ns.play("http://anysite.tld/stream.m4a");
--------

Maybe you can help or know where can help us. We tried also call adobe but nobody could help us ;(

thx,
Dennis

Posted by: dennis at March 5, 2008 02:45 AM

>>>>@Tom - Flash Player supports progressive download and streaming *through FMS*. In other words, at this point in time streaming of H.264 is through RTMP/FMS only.

Hi Emmy,

i read the old comment that already someone got the same issue. So it is planned in a future release, maybe Flash 10, to support AAC-Streams for everywhere instead just of RTMP/FMS? Or in other Question is there anything possible or something to buy from adobe to get a radio station with ~1000 different streams with flashplayer and aac-hev2 (from icecast?!) to work?

thx for your answears,
Dennis

Posted by: dennis at March 5, 2008 02:58 AM