New Adobe Media Player ushers in AIR 1.5

The latest version of Adobe's stand-alone player for Flash media appears only cosmetically different, and we've noticed a few bugs in our tests. But the big changes are under the hood, with Flash 10 and the latest AIR platform.

Now on a par with specialist content delivery services such as Joost, Adobe Media Player began upgrading itself on users' systems today to version 1.5. Besides a change of the shade of AMP's panels to a not so dark grey (about a "3" on a "10" scale rather than a "2"), viewers may not notice much functional difference; though the episode library was already stacking up rather nicely, it's not much larger this week than last week.

The whole point of upgrading, as it turns out, is an incentive to move viewers to Adobe's two most important platforms: Flash 10, which launched last month and AIR 1.5, which actually does have some significant new innovations that perhaps developers will more readily appreciate than just viewers.

Among the most important of these additions is the ability for distributed applications to encrypt SQL databases on the local level. Being able to use local data on the client side frees AIR applications from resorting to using cookies, like a mere Web browser app, or tying up storage space on the server. AIR 1.0 apps had that ability, and they could also encrypt associative variables (single symbols, single values). Now they can encrypt entire tables of data, and that's important because media applications such as AMP 1.5 itself generate lists that are displayed in interactive table controls.

Encryption protects that data so that it's more likely it can only be used by the legitimate application; and in the encryption process, a key is generated which could, for all intents and purposes, be the equivalent of SSL's session key. That is, it can serve to identify the session in progress, thus preventing unauthorized applications from hijacking the active session.

AMP 1.5 still presents high-quality video downloads and very fast streaming. But the biggest problem we've uncovered so far in our early tests are, frankly, the same ones we encountered with the 1.0 edition: AMP doesn't like sharing the screen with other applications that make special use of on-screen graphics. For example, on a test system that's also running Winamp -- an app that uses its own method of generating window space for itself, and often of reserving that space as well -- we can't resize the AMP 1.5 window using the lower-right corner resize button without the app losing track of the window's origin. The entire window is replaced instead with the shadow effect that should fall just beneath it (though we can still hear the audio) and the only way to disengage the application is through Task Manager.

In fact, even when we unload Winamp, the problem persists for the remainder of the session; you can't resize the AMP 1.5 window using the tool in the lower right corner without wreaking havoc.

Thus far, AMP 1.5 doesn't play nicely with all video cards. For instance, when relying on hardware acceleration to expand the active video to full-screen on a test system with an Nvidia 8600 GTS card and a widescreen monitor (1680 x 1050), AMP misjudges the screen to be twice as large as it truly is, so you can only see the upper left corner of the feed. To correct this problem, we had to turn hardware-assisted scaling off.

We were happy with the fact that this time around, AMP minded us when we explicitly asked it not to start up automatically. This is not an installation option, so our firewall did trap AMP's attempt to add an entry to the CurrentVersion\Run registry key; but once we switched off that entry in Options, AMP 1.5 did remove that entry from the registry.

AMP 1.5 is not solid yet, which has to give one pause when considering whether AIR 1.5 is a solid enough platform upon which to build a Web application around which one's business might depend.