

Flash 10.1 on Nexus One is not a battery hog - martythemaniak
http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/24/battery-performance-with-flash-player-10-1-on-nexus-one/

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dpcan
I'm not speaking one way or the other about Flash, but I'm so sick of
Adobe/Flash being so pitifully defensive about Flash on mobile devices and the
iPad.

Someone in the community is going to be a Flash hater. Someone is going to cry
about battery life. Flash is on the N1, you win, now start talking about the
awesomeness it DOES bring!

What kind of company spends this amount of time talking about the crappiest
part of their product?

An explanation is fine, but to go on and get weird about by talking about
potential percentage levels in a few Vimeo videos. That just seems so odd to
me. How many of their users actually saw this video?

~~~
tomlin
"What kind of company spends this amount of time talking about the crappiest
part of their product?"

There is a lot of BS out there regarding Flash.

For example, on HN I can up my karma easily by just hating on Flash. I don't
need prove it or show evidence. As long as I am part of the "gang" mentality,
then I am welcome to shoot my mouth off.

So then there are those who wanna see evidence (crazy people, I know!). We get
scenarios like these -- where the debunker must over explain, over analyze and
over emphasize to get the message across.

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ynniv
This is a deceptive demonstration. The video is H.264, which can be hardware
accelerated on many chipsets. This means Flash may be doing very little work,
and undermines their goal of showing that Flash is an efficient runtime. A
more revealing test would be a traditional FLV, since the argument for Flash
is that it supports "innovation" and wrapping open, hardware accelerated
formats is rather later in the game.

The performance test I want to see is the most common one: a text page with a
Flash banner ad, versus a text page. Adobe would never show it because this
(most common) scenario is the worst case. What would be a 1% CPU situation
becomes something between 5% and 100%, based entirely on the (in)competence of
the (poorly compensated) designer who slapped it together for the ad agency.

~~~
tomlin
I see your point, however, I don't see a compared alternative. If you had
compared it to a canvas-driven animated banner or a HTML5+JS driven video
player perhaps? Still 1%?

Doubtful.

~~~
ynniv
I doubt that anyone would seriously employ a canvas based video player with
the advent of the HTML5 video tag. However, your implication that JS can also
chew up CPU is valid. I have no defense except to say that the browser vendors
have fine grained control over JS, while Flash is an opaque box. For instance,
the browser could restrict setTimeout to a lower framerate, which has a
different (better) effect than simply limiting the CPU.

~~~
tomlin
It's incredibly trendy to beat up on Flash. How come whenever the conversation
of Flash vs. JS+HTML5 comes up and we've all circulated our points of view, a
sudden "dream world" emerges to save the argument?

I tire of defending the present-day reality vs. the someday utopia that Flash-
bashers seem to hold so dear.

HTML5+JS is great, I love it. But no one who pays for content cares. We
wouldn't even be discussing this if the opposite were true.

------
roc
> _Without optimizing your applications, Flash or otherwise, they can perform
> badly on any platform this is 101 for any software developer._

Don't the two paragraphs following that quote pretty much gut Adobe's standard
pitch? That we _need_ Flash on mobile devices so we can access content that
_already exists on the web_?

Their own evangelists are (rightly) recommending that anyone serious about a
mobile product needs to design and test for those devices and that simply
pointing a touch-based mobile at an flv designed for PCs with keyboards and
mice is not going to work.

But that being the case, why isn't the argument for Flash about its
comparative advantages vs per-device apps, HTML5, etc?

It's not as if there isn't a compelling and rational case to be made there.

------
mambodog
Great, Adobe, so you are able to code something properly. So now maybe you'll
think about addressing the Mac and Linux plugins? Which are still horrible?

~~~
smackfu
Funny thing is that in the recent blog post about fixing issues with the Mac
plugin, people complained about Linux and mobile browsing.

~~~
philjackson
Why's it funny? The Linux plug-in /is/ terrible.

~~~
radley
I think his point is no matter what Adobe fixes or does right, many people on
HackerNews are strictly anti-Flash and insist on adding Strawman and other
noob debating responses.

------
danudey
I find it interesting that the example they use is 'playing h.264 video',
something which the Nexus One can do hardware-accelerated. How many hours of
actual animation does it get when it doesn't get to offload 90% of its work to
dedicated silicon?

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jrockway
OK, but it's still proprietary and closed-source. Fix that, then we can worry
about how much battery it uses.

~~~
tomlin
Then can we also look at how far the standard would have advanced as open-
source? Maybe considered that H.264 is in fact NOT an open standard?

I want to live in the magic world where open-source development moves as fast
as proprietary as well, but I can't.

~~~
jrockway
There are plenty of Free implementations of H.264.

~~~
tomlin
Who's using them? Adobe isn't. Firefox, WebKit? Nope.

~~~
jrockway
Chromium on Linux uses ffmpeg's (open-source) h.264 implementation. Firefox
doesn't use it because they are making a policy stand, "Theora or nothing."
Technically, h.264 would work fine, it would just be illegal to distribute in
countries with software patents.

mplayer also uses ffmpeg's h.264 code, and I am sure VLC does too. In other
words, every open-source video application that can play h.264 uses an open-
source h.264 implementation.

Remember, there are no technical problems with h.264. It is a good algorithm
with plenty of good (and Free) implementations. The problem is that the group
that patented h.264 wants money every time you encode a video with h.264,
upload a video encoded with h.264, and play a video with h.264. Because the
Internet will suck when this happens, people are trying to ensure it doesn't.
(Killing Adobe will help, because they make money from giving away h.264
licenses that they already paid for, and hence are demanding that Theora not
be in the HTML5 spec they are writing.)

~~~
tomlin
Thank you for your thorough insight. I appreciate a good explanation with
facts :)

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pierrefar
This sentence: "Bloggers ... spent a little more time than expected studying
the battery indicators, as opposed to the incredible advancements in web
browsing for mobile phones." Having Flash on my mobile is not an advancement
in web browsing, on mobile or desktop: People block Flash for a reason, and
that sentence just comes across as arrogant.

------
kylec
Instead of blogging about it, they need to release it so we can see what it's
like for ourselves.

------
thehigherlife
7 hours of rated battery life down to 3 hours with flash? Not a battery hog at
all.

~~~
mbrubeck
The rated "7 hours of video" is for video stored on the device rather than
streamed over the internet; note that the same Nexus One specs[1] claim only 5
to 6.5 hours of internet usage (5hr for 3G and 6.5hr for wifi).

It's not surprising that doing both at once will run down the battery about
twice as fast.

[1]: [http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-
nexusone_tech_specs...](http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-
nexusone_tech_specs.html)

~~~
eli
Heck, I probably only get 4 hours of solid Robo Defense play (a native android
app that doesn't access the internet).

Keeping that backlight lit is going to use up the battery no matter what
you're doing.

------
tomlin
steve jobs lied? wtf, really?

