The latest update to the Flash Player brings serious video quality improvements, for those who have the right hardware. In this video interview with Tinic Uro of Adobe, he discusses the specifics. Here are the highlights:

• Core renderer will now support multi-core hardware, giving us fully multi-threaded performance (so, if you have the right system, full-screen HD Flash video can be amazing quality, and screaming fast).
• The native resolution of the video in Flash is scaled up to full-screen through hardware acceleration.
• This hardware acceleration is implemented using OpenGL on Mac and Direct3D/DirectDraw on Windows.

Pretty exciting stuff, even though most of us don’t have the hardware to experience it just yet. Just more proof that Adobe is serious about video.

I ran across this free video player, called video.maru, that allows you to play FLVs without using the FLVPlayback component, and without writing even one line of ActionScript.

http://polygeek.com/videomaru/

Seems like a good solution for those who just don’t want to deal with AS, period. His implementation is really quite clever, and pretty intuitive. Worth a look for those just getting started with Flash video and know they don’t want too many custom features.