Today VideoPress was upgraded to OSMF 1.6, bringing better performance, lower power usage and a couple of new features.

Performance

Adobe recently updated Flash Player to improve hardware-accelerated video decoding called StageVideo; VideoPress now takes advantage of the latest features of Flash Player for lower CPU and memory consumption in Adobe Flash Player 10.2 and above.

VideoPress uses Stage Video to split up video processing between multiple CPU cores, GPUs, and hardware decoders to improve video performance by up to 85% and decrease RAM utilization. For you, this means smoother video playback and lower power usage on netbooks, smartphones, tablets, and other low-power devices. Desktop playback will still deliver the same results great results you’re used to, now with fewer resources.

Features

The big new feature we’ve added today is progressive seek. Instead of having to wait for a video to download before you can jump ahead, VideoPress now supports seeking to any place in the video, without needing to load the entire video. This also means you can switch between HD and SD at any time and your video will continue playing from the same spot.

Finally, for those of you who use multiple monitors, VideoPress will now play nicely in full screen mode – you can play videos on one screen, and keep doing other things on the other!

VideoPress has a new look! The VideoPress Flash player has been completely rewritten on top of the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). This new MPL-licensed framework led by Adobe provides common player functionality shared by most video players: play/pause, volume control, download progress, buffering, and more. VideoPress extends this shared foundation with custom skins, VideoPress-specific functionality such as video sharing and HD toggle support, and partner integrations including WordPress.com Stats, Quantcast demographics, and CDN providers. Partner integrations are much simpler through OSMF plugins offering advertising and analytics built by each potential partner.

The new VideoPress player replaces the Embed menu with a new Share menu. Your video’s WordPress Shortcode and HTML embed snippet are now hidden behind a copy-to-clipboard button. We have also exposed direct download links for the highest quality video available in MP4 (H.264/AAC) and Ogg (Theora/Vorbis) formats. These download links were previously hidden within your blog’s RSS feed, available to podcatchers such as iTunes and Miro or direct download from a feed preview screen. Your viewers now have the option to download a high-quality video for full-screen viewing in their favorite desktop video player or on a television. We have renamed our blog-level and video-level sharing preferences to reflect this change.

The new VideoPress Flash player includes support for the many written languages of the VideoPress community. Please visit our VideoPress translation page to help us support even more languages inside the VideoPress player.

We are excited by the new player foundation and opportunity for future expansion of video playback features and partners.