Adobe has officially launched the latest version of its Flash player. Flash 10.1 had been available for a while now in beta, but the official status will see millions of Flash users worldwide making the switch.

Flash 10.1 should mean better video streaming from services such as the iPlayer and YouTube, especially if you've got a low powered processor and a decent graphic chip. Adobe's Paul Betlem explains: "Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across supported operating systems. Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance, offering smoother frame rates, and reducing system resource utilisation".

What this means is that if you've got, for example, an Acer Aspire Revo the processing strain will be taken off of the Intel Atom chip, with the work being done by the far more capable Nvidia graphics card.

Other features include HTTP Dynamic Streaming, better buffering, p2p video, multicast and http streaming, and a new set of ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events.

The update is available from here now, and an Android version of 10.1 will follow later on this month. Download it, and let us know how you get on.