

Full Flash Player 10 for Q2 2010 on every major smartphone except iPhone - tomsaffell
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4ZBVHRMYW5Z3BQE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=220301033

======
mdasen
I think Apple's hoping that video will start being done through HTML5 - or at
least that sites will offer HTML5 video via H.264 as an option. For many sites
pushing Flash video already in H.264 (as my organization is), this would
require minimal changes.

This would be great for me as Flash usually uses around 90%+ of one core on my
box to decode video while other media players (QuickTime, VLC) use a third of
that. This is going to be hard for a lot of handhelds and hopefully that will
lead HTML5 video to offer a much better experience on mobile devices.

Adobe knows that if they don't get Flash out for mobile platforms, Flash is
going to be left out of the next push on the web in favor of Ajax and HTML5.
So, while Adobe does dominate a lot of things right now, their position is
tenuous.

~~~
immad
> Flash usually uses around 90%+ of one core on my box to decode video

Is that on a linux box?

~~~
electromagnetic
I can have 3/4 flash-apps running (like facebook games, etc) with no
appreciable effect on my 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400, which doesn't have an
ATI/nVidia chipset. I upgraded the ram, but only to 1 & 1/4 gig (maximum is 2
gig) from 512 meg. It's a core 2, 1.66 ghz, totalling ~3.3 ghz.

I'm unsure how anyone's system can be hitting 90% on one of their cores if my
3 year old machine barely hits 10% of a core when viewing solely a HD youtube
video. Chrome (including Flash) was hitting about 50% earlier with two
facebook games loaded up and a HD youtube video running.

Flash is unseemly solely because it doesn't multithread, that's the only
support that needs urgently implementing. H.264 through HTML5 is a pipe dream
and likely to be unaccepted for a long period of time, content providers like
Youtube and Hulu aren't going to allow or be allowed to provide their video in
H.264 as it's simply far too easy to download.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You can already rewrite Youtube pages to play the exact same video via HTML5.
I linked to the plugin you need elsewhere in this thread.

So Youtube in flash is already "far too easy to download" and Flash's
"encrypted" streaming mode has been broken too, though it turned out not to be
that protected anyway.

------
jsz0
I think it's very unlikely that mobile Flash 10 is going to offer acceptable
performance on current generation hardware. So we're probably looking at 18-24
months from today for the market to cycle up to the point where a $99
SmartPhone can handle Mobile Flash 10. On top of that you have to factor in
all the legacy devices out there and their lifespan before being replaced with
more capable devices. Can Flash really survive the next 2-3 years with a very
limited mobile presence? It seems to me most of these devices are going to end
up having better support for HTML5 and other emerging technologies much
sooner. I suspect by the time Mobile Flash is remotely usable it will
primarily be a legacy platform.

------
tomsaffell
I realized I slightly butchered the title (to get a date in and fit to
length).

Adobe's _plans_ are that there will be Flash 10 on _some_ devices in the
_first half_ of 2010 - all other major platforms (excl. iPhone) are planned,
but perhaps not for the first half of 2010.

------
dareiff
It might be there, but it won't necessarily be good.

Flash still stutters on Atom-based devices.

~~~
danh
Flash still stutters on Core 2 Duos, in my experience...

~~~
electromagnetic
Flash only runs on a single core, and most Atom's have the same processing
size as a core on my Core 2 (1.66ghz x 2). This means any very intensive flash
will still max out a processor, which is why flash urgently needs to implement
hyperthreading to alleviate this process, until it does it's in risk of
replacement in some areas of its market.

~~~
blasdel
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about re: concurrency. If
mentioning cores repeatedly (and summing their clock rates) wasn't enough of a
giveaway, proposing _Hyperthreading in userspace_ is just hilarious.

The problem with flash is not that it's single-threaded -- it's because NSAPI
plugins run in (and block) the main() thread!

~~~
utku_karatas2
I guess you mean NPAPI.

------
mquander
A question for people who are more knowledgeable than me about Flash and
Actionscript -- from whence do these performance problems originate? Is it
primarily Macromedia/Adobe's poor technology causing the problem, or is it
developers writing really bad Flash applications? Or is it some other bad
integration layer between Flash, the browser, and the hardware?

~~~
blasdel
A) Macromedia + Adobe = :(

B) Some flash video player wrappers are _much_ worse than others. Hulu's is
particularly slow, Comedy Central's basically refuses to work on Linux.

C) Flash has to do the YUV->RGB conversion internally so that it can composite
your poorly-conceived UI on top of it. It's almost immune to hardware
acceleration (except in full-screen mode). Then it has to run in the main()
thread of an intrinsically memory-gobbling application.

 _D) All of the above_

------
johnnybgoode
They can't even get Flash to work well on the desktop. Video performance is
abysmal. Sure, it's _possible_ that they'll get their act together for the
mobile versions, but it seems unlikely. And that is a very good thing.

~~~
chipsy
The more I work with Flash the more I see glaring faults that will probably
never be resolved:

-Lousy internationalization(showstopper language-specific input bugs have remained unfixed for a year+)

-Inconsistent API access(For example, you can load a Sound from a ByteArray, but not a Video.....), new features are arbitrarily exposed via one of the Flash IDE, AS3 APIs, and MXML and not necessarily the others.

-Default fonts fall back on system fonts. Hence many swfs render text incorrectly, sometimes illegibly, on platforms lacking the fonts they were built for.

-Major performance variations across platforms. Using lots of alpha transparency for your game? Then say goodbye to Linux, because alpha is absurdly slow on that platform. (Plus to rub salt in the wound, since there's no palettized, colorkeyed transparency, that's kind of the only option for most layered effects.)

I have this dim hope that the JVM will somehow reemerge as a strong browser
gaming platform, as it has great modern languages and tons of libraries and
infrastructure - putting it technically well ahead of any other option I know
of, but MS played that crucial king-maker role for large-scale deployment of
Flash early on; nothing points to that scenario ever happening for the JVM. So
if you want to reach the largest gaming audience possible Flash is still going
to be "it" for the foreseeable future.

~~~
johnnybgoode
Interesting info. What is your opinion of the prospects for browsers with
canvas, O3D, etc. as a gaming platform?

~~~
chipsy
There is a strong possibility that a platform using Javascript and some
combination of canvas/O3D/other APIs will emerge in the next decade. But it
will take a while and not all the pieces are visible yet, because you need to
support several I/O components beyond fast graphics to have a really credible
game platform:

-user file system access, low-level networking, swf or jar-style data & code bundles

-input devices: keyboard, mouse, gamepad...graceful coordination of input between the rest of the browser and the game is needed.

-sound and music, preferably with abilities to do runtime sound generation and processing

Missing one of those isn't necessarily a showstopper, with the right kind of
game, but together they put severe constraints on what can be built and how
easily it can be distributed. Flash has very gradually and awkwardly added
some degree of support for all of these things, but its origins as a graphic
design and animation tool still pollute the design, even with the major
refactor of Flash 9 and Actionscript 3.

The JVM platform is a lot more self-consistent and it has solutions for all of
this stuff right now, hence why I'm more hopeful about it than a Javascript-
based solution, or another plugin like Unity.

~~~
johnnybgoode
Thanks for the response. I wonder what percentage of users will have the JVM
installed in the future; maybe it depends on Oracle's plans.

------
bbuffone
I for one am happy that there isn't Flash on the iPhone. If it could be
garenteed that it was only delivering a video, than I would tolerate it.

General Flash use on my desktop is annoying, but on an iPhone it would be way
worse. Plus not having to download the extra content, which really ends up
being useless anyways is a waste.

