While Apple may have turned their back on Adobe’s Flash technology, the same cannot be said for Adobe turning their back on Apple. After a lengthy beta period, Flash Player 10.1 is finally available and promises hardware-accelerated decoding and other goodies for recent Macs.

MacRumors is reporting that an otherwise modest security update on Tuesday for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 also brings with it hardware accelerated decoding for video content. That means smoother playback, lower system resource usage and even longer life for notebook users.

“We just pushed a few minutes ago a new version of the Flash Player 10.1.82.76 containing a nice feature that was in beta until now called ‘Gala,’” notes Adobe Flash project manager Thibault Imbert. “Yes, H.264 GPU decoding in Mac OSX is now officially enabled in the Flash Player. You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature.”

Flash Player 10.1 was actually released in June, but without the hardware acceleration for Mac OS X. Cutting-edge users were able to download a beta of the “Gala” preview release from Adobe Labs, however.

In order to take advantage of the hardware acceleration, you’ll need a Mac manufactured within the last couple of years. Adobe lists the models supported:

- MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
- Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
- MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
- iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

To take advantage of the new Flash Player 10.1, head over to Adobe’s website and get your download on today.

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter