Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta 3 Comes w/o 64-bit Linux

Adobe's Mike Melanson has updated the Adobe Penguin.SWF blog for Linux users and it's not an update on his Linux video acceleration rant, but rather to announce that Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 has been released. As has been the case with Adobe for a while now, the Linux Flash version has been updated in tandem with the Windows and Mac OS X builds. However, the 64-bit Linux Flash Player still is not being updated at the same time as the 32-bit Linux version.

Melanson's one-sentence blog post can be read here, but it just refers users to visit the Adobe Labs Flash page. The Beta 3 release of the Adobe Flash Player adds support for the Intel GMA 500 "Poulsbo" (such as what's found with the recently reviewed CompuLab Fit-PC2) and also Broadcom's Crystal HD media decoding processor.

Through the use of the Crystal HD chipset and this updated beta release, it should be possible to play 1080p Flash videos very easily on low-powered netbook computers. But it likely will not work for Linux users at this time. Melanson hasn't commented whether the Crystal HD video decoding support will work on Linux with this release, but chances are slim considering the "big" Flash Player 10.1 feature is GPU-assisted video decoding and that isn't supported by either the 32-bit or 64-bit Flash Player Linux builds. This feature is missing because of the aforementioned rant, but in the end Adobe will end up hooking in VA-API and/or VDPAU support -- it's just a matter of when. For those with a netbook or card bearing the Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator, there is an open-source Linux kernel driver and 1080p decoding support has already been hooked into XBMC.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 is shipping as version as 10.1.51.95 for Windows, Mac OS X, and 32-bit Linux, while the latest 64-bit Linux Flash version was last updated earlier this month with a version string of 10.0.45.2. An updated 64-bit Flash Player for Linux web-browsers will come at some point in the future.