
Video Decode Acceleration framework available on Mac OS X 10.6.3 - blasdel
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2267.html
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btucker
Is this what Adobe was complaining wasn't available & their excuse for why
flash video on the mac sucks?

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hy3lxs
According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration>, Flash
did not use DXVA (hardware-accelerated video playback) until 10.1. Video being
the complicated beast that it is, there are probably many reasons why Mac
flash performance was inferior to Windows flash.

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blasdel
And Flash 10.1 won't be shipped for at least another six months. The beta
release with DXVA was only released in November.

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KingOfB
I find it interesting that they don't support any of the video cards in the
Mac Pro (GT 120) or high end iMacs (ATI Radeon). I guess it will make the
biggest difference with battery life in the laptop line so they're not
concerned with the desktops. Still somewhat disappointing.

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mmastrac
Some honest questions:

Does the caller of this API need a patent license to do so? Does the patent
license of H.264 cover decoding of the format through OS APIs, or does each
caller need its own license?

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astrange
Of course you don't. That would be like having to get your own patent license
to use iTunes.

Although you do actually need a license to use the QuickTime AAC encoder in
your own program, but only on Windows. Or so I remember from mailing list
traffic, haven't tried it myself.

~~~
Petter
Yes you will need it, not for using quicktime, but this is a low level API
where you will implement a lot of patent stuff yourself.

~~~
astrange
Oh, I forgot this reply existed.

It isn't. An example of an API that does would be XvMC, which requires parsing
and doing large parts of the video decode yourself.

The most you'd have to to use this framework is parse a .mp4 file yourself.
Such things are not patented.

