Not too long ago, Apple added the Video Decode Acceleration framework to Mac OS X, allowing developers to get low-level access to hardware H264 acceleration. Adobe was quite thrilled about this, because they claimed this was needed for Flash video to become hardware accelerated on the Mac. This feature’s been in beta for a while now, but yesterday they finally released it as part of a regular Flash Player update. Caveat: Apple’s support for this framework can be a bit sketchy.
The new Flash Player for Mac release, version 10.1.82.76, enables the hardware acceleration of H264 on a number of Macintosh computers. The feature has been in beta for a while as Gala, and, in a somewhat uncommon course of action, Adobe decided to include the feature as part of a regular security release.
The problem is that Apple’s support for this new framework is sketchy. Only Macs equipped with NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M GPUs are supported, so anything by ATI is out of luck (the current generation iMac and Mac Pro, for instance).
Even if you do have a Mac with any of these three GPUs, you might still run into problems as there are a number of driver limitations. For instance, “video clips with a width of 864 will fallback to software H264 decoding on the nVidia GeForce 9400M. This is a known limitation of the GeForce 9400M drivers,” Adobe writes, “Unfortunately, YouTube Clips at 480p resolution often use a width of 864. Switch to 720p or 1080p to benefit from hardware acceleration for these clips.”
Get it while it’s hot.
Should we install manually? Or Will apple release this update automatically through software update utility?
This only works on snow leopard right? I am running leopard on a mbp with a 9400m and a 9600m gt.
Only on Snow Leopard indeed, and I’ve read reports that even a supposedly fully supported system with the latest SL update and the correct NVIDIA hardware see no difference between this and the previous non-accelerated drivers.
However, you may see a vast improvement in Safari solely due to the fact that Adobe takes advantage of CoreAnimation in that browser.
I find this quite silly as any 9xxx or higher NVIDIA card in Windows gets the acceleration, yet only three specific cards/chips get spotty support in OS X. Obviously it’s not the hardware’s fault, so what gives? I’d love to know what Apple and Adobe each think of the issue.
on my mbp with the 320m a random video on youtube still manages to suck 40 % cpu on c2d 2.66 GHz. What a load of fail on the part of everybody involved…that is Adobe AND Apple.
However regular flash content has been much improved; Not so much that I’m willing to remove Flashblock, but still an improvement.
The reason it only works for certain hardware is because apple is too lazy to implement its framework for asics with slightly different architecture. Hence no ati acceleration. It’s the usual business with apple.
What strikes me as stupid is the fact that as great a proponent of h.264 apple does not support the older asics which had that support early on. The later models added vc-1 and divx which apple does not support.
Edited 2010-08-11 23:16 UTC
I agree, it seems Flash developers have been learning what not to do and apps have become more streamlined and useful lately. Even those pointless corporate landing pages — so common in the past few years — are becoming mildly entertaining.
Poor support – not Adobe’s fault either! My iMac 24 has an ATI graphics card so this won’t be much use to me.
Is it the case that the ATI hardware can’t do h264 acceleration I wonder.
Quicktime uses NVIDIA’s VP3 (Pure Video 3) API for hardware acceleration of H.264 video
I assume this is what they opened up access to.
Now those worthless flash ads can bog down BOTH your CPU and graphics chip!
FFS, use ClickToFlash or FlashBlock already and be done with the whining!
Actually, I don’t allow Flash on my systems at all.
The issues comes with helping out friends’ parents with their computers and all the hassle that Flash adds to their lives.
That’s odd. Most of the people I provide tech support would be ringing my phone off the hook if they couldn’t access video, games, or any of the other pervasive internet content that requires Flash. But if that’s not a problem for you, more power to you.
Wait, let me get this straight, you admonish Macrat for not blocking flash on his system. He corrects you in saying that he doesn’t run it himself but runs into the issue when supporting friends and family.
You then do a one-eighty and again admonish him because everyone YOU know loves Flash, and by blocking flash (as you said he should do) he and his situation are as you put it, “odd”.
Sorry if I missed something there, it just seems that you are going back and forth in how you seem to feel about Flash just to make him look stupid and whiny, which he obviously is not.
And should you care to ask, my personal take on Flash is that it is a necessary evil of the web, and I’ll be glad to see it eventually replaced by HTML5/CSS/JS apps. Until then, I’ll enjoy my occasional web video or flash game and deal with the inefficient CPU use.
Unrelated but does anyone know if HTML5 Canvas is HW accelerated on the Mac?
I don’t think it is on the iPhone but I wondered about the Mac.
Would be really cool if it could be HW accelerated for iPhone and iPad…
When WebGL is stamped off by default in Safari via WebKit then it will have hw acceleration turned on for all OS X platforms.
A truly loyal dog – no matter how much you kick it, it keeps coming back at lunchtime.
In my opinion, Adobe is too loyal. If I was an exec at Adobe I would have killed all of their products on the Mac platform the day Apple banned Adobe’s cross-compiler for Flash on the iPhone. Abusing your competitors is the standard in today’s world, but Adobe is one of Apple’s largest third-party developers and Apple should view them as a partner rather than a competitor.
Yeah, All our customers who paid big cash for the mac versions of our products… screw’m !!
I never said I’d deactivate current licenses. I would just release a statement that said I was no longer interested in supporting platforms that were hostile to our products. Users would still be able to use future versions on Windows via BootCamp anyway.
I know my reaction is a knee-jerk reaction, but if a company wants to play hardball, then let’s play! But that’s probably one of many reasons I’m not an exec.
Speaking of hardball, pre-antitrust era Microsoft would have been able to kill Apple many times over.
E.g. by sponsoring Adobe to make Apple versions of their software much more expensive than Windows equivalents.
Ah, the good old days ;-).
Edit: and I of course mean “if Microsoft was now what it used to be”. Microsoft of today is pretty much a neutered shadow of its powerful days.
Edited 2010-08-11 19:12 UTC
I wouldn’t say neutered; it’s more diversified than ever, with branches into gaming, embedded platforms, PMPs, as well as that little project called Windows 7.
Speaking of their flagship OS, it’s by far the best desktop Windows since Win2k by a great majority opinion. In my own personal experience, I find it to be an adequate replacement for XP given the right hardware.
But back to the original point, rather than neutered I’d say “spread too thin” and it’s starting to show. It’s like a star approaching the end of its supernova, about to collapse. Whether it shrinks to a white dwarf that we never hear about again, or a black hole that starts sucking the rest of the tech world down with it, remains to be seen.
I wouldn’t say diversified. I would say diluted. Microsoft as a brand has become severely diluted because they haven’t honed in an identity since the whole computing industry took on a new direction with emphasis on mobile computing and media consumption.
*cough* Logic *cough*
Edited 2010-08-12 12:03 UTC
Yes, you know, all Adobe’s foot dragging over the last 10 years has really helped Apple, right? Adobe’s customers using Apple equipment have deserved better.
Adobe wanted cheap development so they did the minimum to get everything running on Mac OS X, except for what wasn’t selling well. This hasn’t helped their customers one bit. e.g., Photoshop 6 in the Classic environment ran better than the “native” Photoshop 7.
I’m using Photoshop CS3 finally but it’s not a good native application, showing CPU usage as though it’s polling. Should the loop code from the 1990s still be there?
Actually, it did. Before the iDevice era, the only compelling reason for most users to use a Mac was Photoshop. While I know it would piss off many hardcore Apple fans from the Mac OS 9 era, I would venture to say that having great color support for apps like Photoshop was the only thing keeping Apple afloat.
During that 10 year period, Apple changed the base of their operating system (OS 9 -> OS X), the display API, swapped entire processor architectures (PPC -> x86), and then pushed for 64-bit support. While I support Apple behind all of these moves, I don’t fault Adobe for falling a little behind on the Mac platform. They had to keep the Mac version of the software feature-complete compared to the Windows version AND support all of these transitions. Meanwhile, they only had to support the transition to 64-bit on Windows. It makes more sense to focus on features since that benefits both platforms rather than try to constantly rewrite pieces of the infrastructure to keep up with one platform. That point is further strengthened if you look at the market share of each platform at the time of these transitions.
Do they even support 64-bit on Windows? Their supporting 64-bit, then dropping it on Linux at the sign of the first security hole has been a disappointment to say the least.
So now where is the Flash 10.1 update for the Nokia N900?
Forget Apple, Adobe. They pretty much called you a bloated bitch to your face, and told you that you can’t join the other children on their iPlayground.
Adobe’s Creative Suite is the bread and butter of most Apple Mac fans. I could only imagine the implications of what would happen if they stopped releasing it for the Mac and instead ported it all over to Linux.
Sure, which GUI on Linux? That’s the question commercial developers ask.
Did you mean which widget toolkit? Like Qt, or GTK+? I’d prefer Qt. It could really be changed to Qt/GTK+ today and use the same interface, with the same look and feel across Operating Systems. If you’re asking me, I prefer the look and api of Qt.
You make it sound like there are a lot of choices, but really it comes down to Qt or GTK.
Being kind of biased, I would say that it just comes down to Qt.
Qt is the most-portable, modern, feature rich GUI library right now.
GTK+ is, though interesting, already showing its age.
Qt is awesome. I wasn’t comparing it to GTK because Qt is a lot more than a GUI toolkit, I just meant that Qt and GTK are primarily the main GUI toolkits that people use to develop Linux apps today.
Adobe porting Photoshop to Qt would be very cool indeed.
Either GTK or Qt. I don’t think anyone would really mind, as I think pretty much everybody has both of them installed. Someone who doesn’t mind installing a big hunk of expensive proprietary software wouldn’t hesitate to install a different toolkit.
I’d love to see the most current version ported to the N900 too (which I don’t own but would love to) and it may happen with the successor to that device.
However, I don’t look for Adobe to be the least bit interested in mainstream desktop Linux support anytime soon. The mobile space is where Linux shines the most to software developers; after all there are more Mobile Linux users than desktop/laptop OS X users, and given the steady climb it may soon overtake Apple’s combined mobile and desktop share altogether.
As much as I enjoy using OS X, that is a day I’m eagerly anticipating. I personally think Linux is truly at home on the mobile platforms — phone, PDA, PMP, and tablet.
You’d think with all the frameworks Apple have created to do the job without resorting to low level APIs, Adobe could have used some or all of them.
I suspect they haven’t even tried any of them.
they did. Besides apples h.264 decoding framework fails on so many levels. It only works well with the one profile that quicktime uses but nobody else does.
Using the APIs you mention would duplicate functionality and ensure that work created on Creative Suite for Mac would look/act different when loaded on Creative Suite for Windows.
Do you understand why true cross-platform apps are important to platform-agnostic companies, or when exchanging work between companies? If Apple think they don’t need cross-platform apps any more, then they’ve grown way too big for their boots.
Unfortunately their treatment of Adobe suggests that – Adobe should have got a pat on the back for moving all their apps to Cocoa before MS or Apple themselves could, but instead they got a slap in the face.
Apple is in the process of updating their drivers:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=991316
This is the second seed so far; from what I understand the drivers, OpenGL and most likely the video decoding acceleration are being given an overhaul. Hopefully the new drivers will translate not only into improved gaming performance but improved video accelerated decoding and OpenCL performance/reliability. Its one of those unfortunate side effects of Apple – due to its caginess they’re not as open with their development as other vendors so in the lack of information people speculate and create rumours (no based on any facts) to fill in the blanks.
Hopefully when the new drivers ship, the Core Animation that it is use for Safari (OpenGL used in Firefox) that we’ll see better performance results on the IE9 test site