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Adobe has launched a public beta of Flash Player 10.2. The biggest change is support for Adobe’s new Stage Video API, which improves support for hardware video acceleration. Translation: If you’ve got a supported video card, you’ll be able to watch HD Flash video without straining your CPU, which means you’ll be able to watch HD video and do other things at the same time without your computer grinding to a halt. Oh yeah, I guess videos should play more smoothly too.

Unfortunately, most netbooks with integrated graphics won’t be able to take advantage of this feature, but if you’ve got a machine with an NVIDIA ION or ATI Radeon graphics card or a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, you should see even better Flash video performance thna before.

Flash Player 10.2 beta also includes hardware accelerated graphics support in Internet Explorer 9.

Adobe also says that Flash Player 10.2 beta supports full screen mode with multiple monitors, letting you view full screen video while working on another display. But I just tested that feature on my setup and found that as soon as I clicked on the screen in my second monitor, the full-screen video went back to a small window.

Adobe Flash Player 10.2 beta is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

via TUAW