Apple and Adobe have exchanged plenty of salvos in their skirmish over the future of rich content on the Web, but now Adobe's attempting to match actions to words. On Tuesday, the company announced the beta release of the next version of Flash Player, which it says will bring vastly improved video performance on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The aptly-named marquee feature of Flash Player 10.2 is Stage Video, which Adobe describes as a new API allowing for high performance video playback with a lower resource footprint. According to the company, Stage Video can leverage a computer's graphics processor to do the heavy lifting for several parts of the streaming video process, resulting in very low CPU usage.

All developers need to do to reap the benefits is switch to the new API in their existing Flash video player code--videos don't need to be reencoded. Also built into Stage Video are DVR-inspired playback controls and content protection. YouTube is listed among those that are already building in support for the new software.

More: http://www.pcworld.com/article/212140/