Software Update: Adobe Flash Player & AIR 23.0.0.162

Adobe has released version 23 of Flash Player and the Integrated Runtime. With Adobe Flash Player it is possible to play Flash content, mainly swf files, on the computer. Popular video sites such as YouTube and Google Video, among others, offer their visitors the opportunity to play videos with the stand-alone Flash Player. Adobe AIR provides a cross-platform environment for developing and playing so-called Rich Internet Applications. The release notes for this release can be found below.

New Features

Mozilla NPAPI AsyncDrawing Support
Async Drawing refers to the method that the browser and Flash Player use to exchange a bitmap surface where Flash Player draws the SWF content. It is used only when the stage is composited with rest of the content in the browser window. This feature allows wmode “direct” (wmode opaque and transparent) to behave as “windowless” in hardware accelerated async drawing. It is not used in fullscreen mode, or in windowed mode where the plugin draws directly to its own window. If asynchronous drawing is unavailable for any reason, the plugin falls back to using the existing synchronous drawing model.
AsyncDrawing is supported in NPAPI Plugin on Windows desktop platforms only. It is currently available from FP version 23.0 in Firefox Nightly 51.0a1, the Firefox versions supporting the feature is yet to be announced. The choice of which Async Drawing path is used (hardware or software) depends on whether the browser supports hardware or software Async Drawing modes.
To disable AsynchronousDrawing support in Firefox, go to “about:config” in the search bar of the browser and set “dom.ipc.plugins.asyncdrawing.enabled” to false.

HSTS Support in Flash Player
Beginning with Flash Player 23, we have introduced support for HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). HSTS is an IETF standard, which enforces user agents (browsers) to use HTTPS for communication instead of HTTP. HTTPS response may have a Strict-Transport-Security(STS) header field that requests the user agent to make further requests in HTTPS. Flash Player will now acknowledge the STS header in HTTPS response.
This will be particularly helpful when a SWF calls another SWF (child SWF) that is present in HSTS enabled server. Flash Player will acknowledge the STS header in the response and further request to the same domain will always be HTTPS. This feature will be helpful in mitigating protocol hijacking attacks and cookie hijacking.

Disabling local-with-filesystem access in Flash Player by default
Beginning with Flash Player 23, local-with-network permissions will now be applied to all local SWF content, regardless of the preference chosen at compile time.

Video and Camera support for Stage3D by VideoTexture for Flash Player (Release)
In Flash Player 20 or earlier, use of video in Stage3D required use of the Video object, which is not hardware accelerated. It involved copying the video frame to a BitmapData object and then loading data onto the GPU, which made it CPU-intensive.
To address this limitation, Video texture object was introduced. It allows you to use hardware decoded video in Stage 3D content. Further, extending this capability in Flash Player 23 release, texture objects have been introduced to support the use of NetStream and Cameras in a manner similar to the use of StageVideo. These textures can be used as source textures in stage3D rendering pipeline. You can use them as rectangular, RGB, or no mipmap textures in rendering of a scene. They are treated as ARGB texture by the shaders which implies that the AGAL shaders do not have to bother about YUV to RGB conversion now. The shaders treat these textures as ARGB textures. This allows you to use the standard shaders with static images without any need for modification. When you render using these textures, the image that is used by the rendering pipeline is the the latest frame at that time. Though, there is no tearing in the video frame, if you use the same texture many times, some of these instances may be picked from different timestamps.
With the use of a VideoTexture object, all this work gets optimized internally – YUV to RGB conversion and texture loading can be completely moved to the GPU. See the VideoTexture devnet article for implementation details.

GameInput API for iOS
Starting AIR 23, we are providing GameInput API support for iOS. GameInput API is an interface that allows applications to communicate with attached Game controllers. There are different types of Game Controllers depending on the number of controls. This API allows an application to get all information related to the Game controller.
GameInput API support has already been available for Android. On iOS, it requires a minimum swf version of 34. This API supports iOS devices running on iOS version 9.0 or higher.

Echo Cancellation on AIR for Android
Starting AIR 23, we have introduced Echo Cancellation for AIR on Android.Acoustic echo occurs when the speaker output feeds back to the built-in microphone input, producing disturbing echoing artifacts and significantly reducing the quality of captured data.
Acoustic echo arises in collaboration applications, where two or more parties carry out interactive conversation. From this release onwards, developers can develop VOIP applications without any echo using AIR on Android.

Microphone.getEnhancedMicrophone
To get access to device Microphone, we use Microphone.getMicrophone(). However, this API returns a simple microphone, which does not have the ability to eliminate acoustic echo. To remove the acoustic echo, developers must get an instance of Microphone using the API: Microphone.getEnhancedMicrophone(). The device microphone returned by this API has the acoustic echo cancellation feature enabled.

The StageText clear button is now optional on iOS
While creating StageText object on iOS, a clear button option is available by default to the AS developers. Beginning with AIR 23, a new feature has been introduced, which makes the StageText clear button optional. This provides more flexibility to the AS developers when using StageText. In the earlier versions, StageText object was created with an integrated clear button.

Windows: Add HiDPI support for AIR desktop (Release)
Beginning with AIR 23, HiDPI support for AIR Desktop on Windows has been introduced. It allows you to provide a higher quality rendering for AIR content on HiDPI displays. This feature works on the concept of higher pixel density scaling instead of pixel-doubling scaling.

Fixed Issues

Flash Player

• Application with Embedded ActiveX (f-in-box) Crashes (4176988)

AIR

• [iOS] ld-64 Compilation getting failed while packaging app with multiple swf and ANE (4182822)
• [iOS] Capabilities.screenDPI gives a wrong value on AIR 22 simulator (4157457)
• [iOS] Context3D.drawToBitmapData uses wrong offset on mobile (4147414)
• [iOS] TextField with TextFieldType.INPUT cuts off text on the left side when focused (4009346)
• [iOS] StageWebView makes application crash (4180325)
• [Android] MP4 Video rendering completely broken in Air 22 on all version of Android (4167492)
• [Android] Full screen display states must use immersive mode on Android 4.4+ (4100625)
• [Android] OpenSSL library upgraded to 1.0.2h version
• [iOS] App using concurrency closes when a class is instantiated on the worker .swf (4067035)
• [iOS] CameraRoll on iOS returns Bitmap in incorrect orientation (4070057)
• [iOS] [Windows] Error, ld: in section __TEXT,__text reloc 153: R_ABS reloc but no absolute symbol at target address for architecture arm64 while packaging Application with Social.ane using flag -hideAneLibSymbols yes (4005515)
• [iOS] sharedobjects fail when available storage is low (3711301)
• TextField contextMenu displayed with offset with HiDPI screens (4177810)