Adobe has released the final version of Flash Player 9 Update 3, which adds the HD video support announced earlier this year. Update 3 is the first public version of Flash Player 9 to include support for H.264 HD video playback, which means HD video on YouTube is now within the realm of possibilities.
It generally takes around a year for Flash Player update to reach the magical 80+ percent saturation that sites of YouTube's scope want before unveiling new features, but there's plenty of other video sharing sites that have already made the HD leap, which puts some extra pressure on YouTube. And with a subset of YouTube content already encoded in H.264 for iPhone and AppleTV users, YouTube may offer web-based H.264 support sooner rather than later.
The updated Flash Player 9 also has some other notable features including better full screen support, Leopard compaitibity for Mac users, multicore support and support for Microsoft Active Accessibility.
And Linux users, hang on to your hats, Adobe has updated the Linux version of Flash Player 9 concurrently with the Windows and Mac versions. Full screen playback was a bit stuttery in Ubuntu compared with that on my Mac (both using Firefox), but otherwise it functioned identically, which should be great news for Linux users who've often felt like second class Flash citizens in the past. [Update: I should point out the Flash Player 9 is still only available for 32 bit Linux.]
Flash developers have new set of API tools to play with in Update 3, for a comprehensive overview of all the new stuff you can leverage via ActionScript have a look at this post on the Adobe Developer Network.
You can grab the latest version of Flash Player 9 from the Adobe download page.
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