The Flash Player is one of the great necessities for Personal Computers to run high-end graphics applications. It is an extensively distributed proprietary multimedia and application player initially created by Macromedia but now developed and distributed by Adobe after some brand disputes. The Flash Player runs SWF (Shock Wave Flash) files which are created by any third party tools including Macromedia.



The Flash Player, written and distributed by Adobe, uses vector and raster graphics, ActionScript, a native scripting language, and bidirectional streaming of video and audio. ?Flash? can mean an authoring environment, a virtual player machine running Flash files and application files.

Flash Player has support for an embedded scripting language called ActionScript (AS), which is based on ECMAScript. Since its commencement, ActionScript has matured from script syntax without variables to one that supports object-oriented code, and may now be compared in capability to JavaScript.

The Flash Player was originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animation, but has since become suitable for creating rich Internet applications and streaming video and audio. It uses vector graphics to minimize file size and create files that save bandwidth and loading time.

The Flash Player is built into some browsers and is available as a plugin for recent versions of other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer on selected platforms.

History of Flash Player:

Macromedia Flash Player 2 (1997)

Macromedia Flash Player 3 (1998)

Macromedia Flash Player 4 (May 1999)

Adobe Flash Lite 2.1 (December 2006)

Adobe Flash Player 10 (version 10.0.12.36, codenamed Astro)

The Macromedia Flash 7 comes with a variety of functions, making it an productive environment for future development. The player makes use of vector graphics to minimize the size of files and creates files that are designed to save both loading time and bandwidth use.

The complete history of the Flash has been cut-down in order bring focus of the past advancements and present advancements.

The Latest Version:

Flash 10 is the latest version flash player which will be released for Linux, Mac and Windows. It will have features like, express install, autorun and multi-core support. Other features of the latest version of Flash Player are:

3D effects

Custom filters and effects

Advanced text support

Dynamic sound generation

Drawing API

Hardware acceleration

Vector data type

Dynamic Streaming

Speex audio codec

File upload and download APIs

Color correction

How a custom flash player can help businesses: We have seen major league sites like YouTube the potential that online video has to offer so the creators decided to give online internet users the ability to share their creations with the rest of the world. Youtube was bought by Google for 1.6 Billion dollars after one a year and a half of its activities.Custom flash players give website owners a way to display their videos on their own websites with their own personal embedded logos.One best thing about online video is that the search engines cannot accurately index them.