

Flash Video Performance: Solving Different Problems - blasdel
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different_problems.html

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dschobel
_"But at least with HTML5 video tag data, I can download the video and play it
offline using a dedicated player."

Try to keep up here. That's not the problem that Flash Player is chartered to
solve (same goes for HTML5 video). I know you're smart enough to download
videos and watch them offline, but try to think on a macro level._

Not the most useful tone to take when trying to explain your technology and
win people over...

~~~
blasdel
Given the scorn heaped upon him from us internet assholes, I think it's
appropriate for him to reply with some gentle snark. We'd think worse of him
if he didn't -- he'd sound like a suit.

------
imurray
_"But minority browsers don't use as much CPU while playing HTML5 video tag
data."

Are you sure about that?_

Yes.

I just tried it again to be doubly sure. In Chrome the YouTube HTML 5 demo
uses 2/3 of the CPU used by the Flash-based version. In Firefox playing the
demo ogg files at:
<http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html> uses about half
the CPU than playing the video with Flash in YouTube. This is all in Linux.

~~~
blasdel
Sure, playing Theora from <video> takes about half the CPU that the Linux
Flash plugin playing h264 does. His point is that they both have to do similar
YUV-RGB and rich compositing bullshit within the rendering runtime -- and
they're within the same order of magnitude of performance.

mplayer takes a 1/20th the CPU cycles on the same normal desktop machine
without even using hardware decoding optimizations. I wouldn't be surprised if
its CPU usage was nearly optimal for the amount of data copying that needs to
take place.

~~~
imurray
On my machine playing the same videos in mplayer or vlc is very close to the
CPU used playing in the browser using the video tag.

I did read the article, which continued from the bit I quoted as:

 _As of this writing, browsers that support the video tag are likely to use a
tremendous amount of CPU in order to play video. Why? It's likely because they
have to deal with the exact same performance penalties that Flash does;
specifically, that YUV video data needs to be transformed into RGB data to be
plopped in the browser window._

The implication was that the video tag will be just as bad as Flash, which
just isn't my experience.

