Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Dec 2010 23:20 UTC
The sweet smell of competition is lingering in the air. That sweet smell which indicates that somewhere in the vicinity a company is working on actually improving a product so we can all benefit. This time around, it's Adobe, delivering the first Flash 10.2 beta. Prime feature? Complete hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline - fully cross platform, cross-form factor. Cross-platform! There's a catch, though.
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Member since:2008-03-17
Member since:2005-07-06
Unfortunately the frameworks that Apple provide for flash acceleration (or any other video format) are really crappy as seen in QTX, nowhere near the flexibility and capability of things like VDPAU or DXVA2
Adobe doesn't use QTX for Flash - they utilise Core Animation, Core Audio, VDPAU which is called VideoDecodeAcceleration.framework - the framework is merely the nVidia framework relabelled and provided on Apple. There is also more to hardware acceleration than just having the right API's on the system the browser also has to support 'Pepper Extensions' to NPAPI:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI
And go down to "Accepted NPAPI Specifications" where so far only Safari and Chrome have actually implemented such features hence the reason why the performance of Flash on Firefox is craptacular on Mac OS X but works beautifully with Safari and Chrome.
Member since:2005-11-21
Member since:2009-08-26
Member since:2005-08-12
One thing has nothing to do with the other. And Flash still performs poorly on mobile devices such as the Sansung Tab. And that's got a two core CPU, and a small screen. How many phones are using 10.1? Three, four?
You think it's just Apple? While they're the ones who are willing to say things publicly, most other manufacturers aren't exactly hurrying to support it.
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Member since:
2010-02-25
You're absolutely right. And now that hardware acceleration for Flash is possible, I'm sure Apple will proudly announce Flash on the iPhone and iPad any day now.
</sarcasm>