Flash 10.1 Released, now HD YouTube Videos Won’t Run Like Flipbooks June 14, 2010

From the “two years late” department, Adobe has finally gotten around to taking Flash 10.1 out of beta and put it in the hands of everyone who goes to their site to upgrade their old versions of Flash 10, or since most people don’t know about that sort of thing, probably versions of Flash 8 or 9 (anyone with versions older than that have probably had their computers die on them by now).

The important extra feature about this release, GPU rendering.  That’s right, something that video players have had since 2003, making rendering HD video since then on mid range and high range PC’s extremely seamless and beautiful.  Well, even though flash has supported HD video for a few years on sites like YouTube and Gametrailers, you’d probably notice that the videos in HD would usually run like crap, because until yesterday flash was CPU rendering only, which in this modern time is equivelant to having your software stuck in 1998.

So you’ll probably notice an increase of performance on our YouTube embeds if you upgrade.  You’ll probably also notice you won’t have to cut the Gametrailers feeds to download the video instead, because their streaming videos (since they forced flash playback) have been unwatchable.