This beta release provides access to the Flash Player 11.4 runtime for Windows and Mac OS desktop environments. The key features and benefits of Flash Player 11.4 are:
- Concurrency (ActionScript Workers)— This feature enable developers to off-load certain tasks like high-latency operations and long-running computations to “workers”. These background workers run concurrently in order to leverage more machine resources and avoid things like UI freezes and allow content to be more responsive.
- Stage3D constrained mode— A new parameter to Context3D has been introduced called "constrained profile". Constrained profile allows Stage3D content to run hardware accelerated on more hardware, especially the Intel GMA chipsets. The Starling framework has been updated to be constrained mode ready.
- StageVideo.attachCamera— Provides webcam support for StageVideo. This allows developers to leverage GPU acceleration to render webcam video streams.
- Camera.copyToByteArray/Camera.copyToVector— Allow efficient copy of the video frames pixels to an existing ByteArray or Vector.
- LZMA support for ByteArray— In addition to zlib compression of ByteArray, we are introducing an additional compression type based on LZMA to compress data inside a ByteArray through ByteArray.compress() and ByteArray.uncompress().
In addition to new features, we continue to address stability and performance issues with Flash Player. We would like to recommend that everyone that installs the beta releases opts into the automatic updates. We will be delivering regular updates via the update service during the week, some of these releases will be exclusive to this service. Please see this post for more details: 8/6/2012 - Flash Player 11.4 Beta Updates
You can find instructions for getting started with this release here: Flash Player 11.4 Labs Page
Finally, we encourage you to let us know what you think over on our 11.4 Labs forums