Flash Player 10 beta 2 was released on earlier this week and includes new features and bug fixes.

Adobe Flash Player 10, code-named "Astro," introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements.

This public prerelease is an opportunity for developers and consumers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content. Once you've installed Flash Player 10 beta, you can view interactive demos. You can also help make Flash Player better by visiting all of your favorite sites, making sure they work the same or better than with the current player.

Key New Features

3D Effects - Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.

Custom Filters and Effects - Create and share your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.

Advanced Text Layout - A new, flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Enhanced Drawing API - Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Visual Performance Improvements - Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

Enhanced Sound APIs - Work with loaded MP3 audio at a lower level in Flash Player 10. The new APIs will let you do application-level audio mixing through ActionScript and even audio filtering with Adobe Pixel Bender.

System Requirements

System requirements for Flash Player 9 are available on Adobe.com. Flash Player 10 no longer supports Mac OS X versions 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3, nor Windows 98. Ubuntu support has been added, and we have updated our support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux distributions as follows:

Supported for Flash Player 9
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 update 8, RHEL 4 update 4 (AS/ES/WS), Novell SUSE 9.x or 10.1

Supported for Flash Player 10
RHEL 5 , SUSE 10.3

For more information see the Adobe Labs Web site.