

Beta Flash Player 'Gala' supports H264 video hardware decoding on Mac OSX 10.6.3 - not_an_alien
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/gala/

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ComputerGuru
_To date, support for hardware accelerated H.264 video playback in Flash
Player has only been possible on Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks_

I love how they try to make it look like they support two different platforms
when they're both exactly one and the same..... and they forgot to add "that
run Windows" at the end of the sentence, because netbooks running Linux or OS
X are _not_ hardware-accelerated.

Shame, really.

~~~
yan
I don't think they're making it sound like they're supporting two platforms,
they're just trying to exclude non-x86-based netbooks..

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nfg
So couldn't they have taken their cue from the PC comment and said:

"To date, support for hardware accelerated H.264 video playback in Flash
Player has only been possible on Windows PCs and _Windows_ -based netbooks"

~~~
ComputerGuru
Or simply "On Windows-based PCs and netbooks"

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dunhamda
From the release notes: "This framework is only supported by Apple on Mac
computers equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT
330M graphics chips."

Unfortunately my three year old MBP is too old :( If someone with a newer Mac
wants to report back on how well this works, here is a good test video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N2YWRJ-ppo>

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silvestrov
OBS: The hardware acceleration is not part of the 10.1 release. It will only
be provided in an update _after_ the 10.1 release.

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Qz
Right -- 'Gala' _is not_ 10.1. It's a separate preview release.

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Manfred
You can already play H.264 with hardware support using QuickTime on the Mac so
there is no reason to use a Flash player. The only reason to use a Flash video
player on all platforms is laziness.

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lukifer
Given that there are Flash players which simply wrap around H.264 files,
there's no reason not to use <video> on browsers which support it, and fall
back to Flash on browsers that don't.

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bshep
Question is 'Does it actually work?'

And if it does, What's the actual improvement in performance?

EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really asking... DOES IT WORK?

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mambodog
I'm still getting 60% (of one core) CPU utilisation playing HD youtube videos.
Playing HTML5 video tag version of the same video, its only about 20%
utilisation. As far as I can remember, 60% is about what it was at before, so
I'm not really seeing any improvement.

One of the videos I used to test: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ_z-_4fF4Y>

I'm using Safari, and also ClickToFlash for switching between Flash and HTML5
HD video on Youtube. Hardware is a 2009 Macbook Pro 2.53ghz.

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not_an_alien
Do you see the white square?

Some of youtube's videos are FLVs, not H264. This is for H264 only.

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mambodog
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all Youtube HD videos either H264 (.mp4)
or H264 in an .flv container? I don't see why a particular container format
would prevent hardware decoding of the H264 video stream.

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mozinator
I would rather have proper 64bit support for linux....

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smackfu
It's funny. Every blog post Adobe makes about improving Apple support has
complaints like this in it. But every one about improving Linux support has
complaints about Apple support.

(Although lately the Apple complaints have changed from "make it suck less" to
"screw you we don't need you".)

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matthewcford
not on my slightly older imac's graphics card.

