Adobe Releases Beta of 64-Bit Flash Player for Mac OS X

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Flash and HTML5 are two very different things for content providers. Don't take it from me, take it from Youtube.

YouTube is in a very particular place in this discussion. The key problem for them is that some groups, like Mozilla, support one standard, and others, like Apple, support another. You have inferior/free vs. superior/something-other-than-free. It is a legitimate concern. It comes to a head for a site as massive as YouTube when they're faced with the possibility of having such a huge number of videos encoded for each video in their service. It just isn't realistic. But Google (you probably know this, but they own YouTube) happens to be one of HTML5's greatest allies. Youtube is also taking steps to adjust to the changing market—they're not sticking their head in the sand.

And now, back to your original statement, that "Flash and HTML5 are two very different things for content providers." That doesn't really mean anything. What does it mean? Of course Flash and HTML5 are different. Nobody is contesting that. What is being decided on a company-by-company basis is what approach they need to take for the time being and how long they're going to stand behind it. It's a totally different discussion with unique circumstances for each company.

Nice to see Flash updated, partly because it'll make my Macs run more efficiently and partly because it really ticks off all of the Flash-hating-Apple-Fanboys who think that iOS devices are actually real computers.

It speaks volumes about you that you'd spend time reading and posting in a Mac forum when you clearly hate the platform. Do something more productive with your time. Future you will appreciate it.

 

[Piggie]

Yup, pretty much the same. What are the specs of your machine?

I should mention that I was using dual screen, to play the animation on my 24 inch monitor, and the screen on the laptop to check out the CPU usage. I don't think that made much of a difference though.

Intel Q6700
Nvidea 8800
And as you 24" screen for animation and 2nd screen for CPU usage readout.

 

[Piggie]

My Core i7 @ 2560x1440 fullscreen hit 197% than quickly dropped to 41% and went between 35% and 45%.

I don't even know how you can technically have 197% of power draw!!!

The settled down figures seem ok though whch is good.
Have you got one of the very high end graphics cards in your i7 model?

Whatever the latest high end ones are?

 

[KnightWRX]

It speaks volumes about you that you'd spend time reading and posting in a Mac forum when you clearly hate the platform. Do something more productive with your time. Future you will appreciate it.

Uh ? Where did he say he didn't like the platform ? I'm with him, anything to piss in Steve's cereals is great. I still love OS X and Macs.

And tell me, what should I encode my videos in to playback to browsers HTML5 support ? Standard that requires 2 different encodes. GG.

 

[guzhogi]

I don't even know how you can technically have 197% of power draw!!!

Each core counts to 100%, so you can have 100% x how many cores you have. In this case, it's almost using all of 2 cores.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

I don't even know how you can technically have 197% of power draw!!!

I might be taking this out of context, but it looks like they are talking about CPU utilization.
It goes over 100% when multiple cores/CPUs are involved.

 

[michaelfengdayu]

Be Ware !!!!

don't know if it's just me having problem after installing it. Youtube video fullscreen will have safari menu bar appearing on top. The uninstaller link on their website is not working.

Hopefully the uninstaller for regular flash plugin will work. Dodge the bullet there.

 

[Piggie]

Thanks for explaining.

Obviously it's reported using a different method from the PC.

All my 4 cores are busy around the same level as the CPU loading is being reported.

So I'm guessing if all 4 cores on a PC are running at 50% load then windows reports CPU utilisation for any given scenario as 50% overall.

Under OSX that same scenario would be being reported as 200% CPU utilisation.

Kinda seems a bit odd, but hey,

 

[rjohnstone]

Are you suggesting that Adobe Flash is an official standard? Or even a draft standard? Or that it is not subject to change?

Flash is a platform (a widely used one at that), but it's not a web standard... never has been and never will be.
Standards are controlled by regulating bodies.
Flash is controlled by Adobe.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Thanks for explaining.

Obviously it's reported using a different method from the PC.

All my 4 cores are busy around the same level as the CPU loading is being reported.

So I'm guessing if all 4 cores on a PC are running at 50% load then windows reports CPU utilisation for any given scenario as 50% overall.

Under OSX that same scenario would be being reported as 200% CPU utilisation.

Kinda seems a bit odd, but hey,

Without checking to confirm, Windows may just be displaying the average utilization (i.e. if one core is used at 50% in a two-core machine it will be displayed to the user as 25%). That does make sense—more sense to the layman—but the OS X way of doing things described above is more informative (if a little confusing at first glance). Few circumstances result in all cores being used equally so no desktop OS would take that as a given.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

I have the 2.8GHZ i7/8GB RAM/ATI 4850 512MB

Like I said the Utilization dropped very quick and settled.

 

[jayducharme]

For the heck of it, I just checked my applications in System Profiler. On my 2008 iMac, there are several Adobe CS5 applications that are listed as being optimized for PowerPC.

I find it surprising that Adobe would release their newest suite and, on an Intel machine, have applications optimized for a non-existent processor. I hope with this move toward Cocoa that Adobe will finally produce consistent software.

 

[Macula]

As long as it works with ClickToFlash…

 

[cg0def]

Using no official, methodical, or statistically accurate testing, it appears to improve performance by at least 10% in my particular case.

Watching a 720p YouTube video with whatever version of Flash I had before, my C2D 2.4 GHz was running all over between 40% and 60% (using a 9600M GT, 4 GB RAM).

After installing the 64b version, CPU usage remained between 30% and 40% for the same video at 720p.

Not bad at all.

Hum I don't know what you are looking at but this is absolutely wrong. On a last gen MBP with an i5 processor and the newest nvidia card (for a mac) I get up to 60% CPU usage on video playback. And before you go on about graphics switching, yes it is using the nvidia card. So sod off Adobe I don't know what you consider hardware acceleration or what the benefits of 64 bit are according to you but the is another pile of the same sh**. Oh and please do keep it off my iPhone. Just for comparison the mpeg4 version of youtube never hits 30% … if you were wondering Adobe, that's what real hardware acceleration is!

Seriously, Adobe get with the program. Either get the Mac version of this ancient crap working or move out of the way.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

The menu bar stays in full screen mode.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Hum I don't know what you are looking at but this is absolutely wrong. On a last gen MBP with an i5 processor and the newest nvidia card (for a mac) I get up to 60% CPU usage on video playback. And before you go on about graphics switching, yes it is using the nvidia card. So sod off Adobe I don't know what you consider hardware acceleration or what the benefits of 64 bit are according to you but the is another pile of the same sh**. Oh and please do keep it off my iPhone. Just for comparison the mpeg4 version of youtube never hits 30% … if you were wondering Adobe, that's what real hardware acceleration is!

Seriously, Adobe get with the program. Either get the Mac version of this ancient crap working or move out of the way.

Could also be Apples fault for not collaborating with Adobe on Hardware acceleration or the terrible graphics drivers Apple ships.

Just saying!

 

[Kensai]

Flash is dead. Nothing to see here, move on.

Excuse me. Flash is not dead. Some people are [brain] dead with comments like that. We're here to read Mac Rumors not do Apple evangelism.

Flash is alive and kicking. These Adobe updates prove it every day.

 

[Corbin052198]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Not just flash, remove java.
And python, php, etc. and don't allow for Ruby. All those are buggy and slow... and non standard.

Apple should only be the latest version of Objective C!

PHP is still used in thousands, probably millions of websites. Including this one, forums.macrumors.com.

Me: "Now, see a world in which there is no PHP!"
You: "AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 

[Bernd]

I have Questions about this 64 Bit Flash

I have some questions about how the 64 bit Flash works.

1). 32 bit flash works as a separate process when working with Safari. Does the 64 bit Flash also work as a separate process also? This is supposed to help a lot with Safari stability

2) Does the 64 bit Flash work with Click to Flash?

I would appreciate anyone with answers posting them for me.

 

[Stridder44]

The coolest part about this isn't just that it's 64-bit but this:

Flash Player 10.1 introduces significant optimizations specifically for Mac OS. As part of our engineering work for 64-bit, Flash Player 10.1 has been rewritten entirely to use the modern Mac OS X Cocoa framework. It also takes advantage of Mac OS technologies such as Core Audio, Core Graphics, Core Foundation, and Core Animation, leveraging native technologies while improving performance.

The fact that they are modernizing their flash code to use Cocoa instead of whatever the older flash used (carbon?) is a big deal and a huge step forward for flash.

Holy crap, I don't @#$%ing believe it. It actually finally happened. Flash...might...not suck?

 

[KnightWRX]

Holy crap, I don't @#$%ing believe it. It actually finally happened. Flash...might...not suck?

10.1 has been around for a few months already, that isn't news.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)



PHP is still used in thousands, probably millions of websites. Including this one, forums.macrumors.com.

Me: "Now, see a world in which there is no PHP!"
You: "AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!"

If its got Joomla, Wordpress, Droopal, vBulletin, IPB, SMF, phpBB, etc. its got PHP. PHP isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

 

[vpndev]

bugs?

Does this new-new version have the same larding of bugs that is plaguing the other releases.

 

[Aniday]

Since everyone seems to be just complaining and not testing, I decided to install it.


Youtube videos seem to take much less cpu on my 2.4GHz core duo late 2008 Macbook Pro, which is pretty surprising. A video before I installed the beta was around 35-40%. After it's around 10-20%. Not bad. Haven't gotten a crash yet... but I'll see how well it performs after continued use.

Spoke too soon. 1 crash after loading a page with flash ads.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Does this new-new version have the same larding of bugs that is plaguing the other releases.

Ive been using it all day without any issues. I've been reviewing Flash media here at work and haven't had any issues.