Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1, But Hardware Acceleration on OS X Not Supported

[deconstruct60]

Not true. In order for Flash to support anything, the browser first has to support it in the plugin framework. This support varies by browser and by browser version. There is a chart on some Adobe employee blog somewhere.

http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html

Again two different modes of operating. Flash goes out of its way to maintain backwards compatibility. Not only this aspect of operating with a long list of browsers, but there are two virtual machines shipped: Actionscript Virtual Machine 1, AVM1, (Flash 8 and earlier ) and AVM2 ( Flash 9 and later ).


Apple on the other hand won't even backport this new low level API to Leopard (10.5 ) .

Somewhere between the two extremes would be a more reasonable compromise. There is some really old Flash code that probably should die. And Apple is just being lazy and snide. (they know that will still be plenty of folks bitching about Flash because have limited the GPUs this will works on; the vast majority of deployed Macs do not have them. )

 

[movieator]

Okay, stupid question....

If I upgrade, what does the whole hardware accelration thing mean exactly?
MBP Unibody 2.66 9600M GT and so forth.

Someone school me.

 

[Amdahl]

LOL! Apple Fanboys make me giggle... hehe

As a long time Mac user I don't get this whole cult of personality edict that many mac users have but too each their own.

Now to the Facts about Flash Player 10.1 for OS X.

It is nice to see a rational person on MacRumors once in a while. I hope you don't get scared off...

 

[deconstruct60]

I like how download times are often given for 56k modem speeds. Is there anyone who still uses dial-up?

If designing your website for world wide tech support...... lots of folks. There are lots of countries where high speed broadband isn't commonplace.

 

[openhammer]

Okay, stupid question....

If I upgrade, what does the whole hardware accelration thing mean exactly?
MBP Unibody 2.66 9600M GT and so forth.

Someone school me.

No problem,

I understand the confusion and the reason for it is that Hardware acceleration is being rolled out in starting in Flash Player 10.1 but in pieces. It's important to not that Flash Player in general is not Hardware Accelerated on ANY platform included windows. Decoding video on the other hand is a different matter, this is in fact done in Windows due to the availability of the low level API's Microsoft has made available for years now. Mac users are $#!t out of luck. Apple just recently released the low level API's but it's for Snow Leopard 10.6.3 and up. The Mac version of Flash Player 10.1 ( with hardware accel. code name gala is in beta ) and will not be made available to later this year.

So in short upgrading to this release of 10.1 will NOT give you hardware accelerated H.264 playback on a Mac. It will however give you a better software based decoder that plays H.264 content better while using less CPU ( specially in fullscreen mode where they are in fact using OpenGL blit to the screen but only in fullscreen mode ).

Upgrading to this release for Mac users will improve drawing performance in a marked way since Adobe is using Core Animation. But be warned that this performance improvement is only for cocoa based browsers.

Lastly you will have a Flash Player release that address a security advisory posted last week.

Best performance scenario for your case would be to indeed upgrade to 10.1 and use a browser that supports cocoa API's in their plugin system like Google's Chrome or Apple's own Safari.

Hope this helps.
Cheers

 

[fifthworld]

This new version is great! My Flash blocker seems much snappier.

One of the best feature of Flash is that is optional: just using click-to-flash so it can be activated on demand, or even not installing the plug in. Good luck with that when Flash will disappears and all content, including the annoying or unwanted one, will be delivered in HTML 5. Is the disappearance of Flash in my best interest?

 

[IntelliUser]

One of the best feature of Flash is that is optional: just using click-to-flash so it can be activated on demand, or even not installing the plug in. Good luck with that when Flash will disappears and all content, including the annoying or unwanted one, will be delivered in HTML 5. Is the disappearance of Flash in my best interest?

Won't be any more difficult. It's clear and visible code, won't be any hard to make an HTML5 Ad blocker. In fact, it'll be easier.

 

[movieator]

No problem,

I understand the confusion and the reason for it is that Hardware acceleration is being rolled out in starting in Flash Player 10.1 but in pieces. It's important to not that Flash Player in general is not Hardware Accelerated on ANY platform included windows. Decoding video on the other hand is a different matter, this is in fact done in Windows due to the availability of the low level API's Microsoft has made available for years now. Mac users are $#!t out of luck. Apple just recently released the low level API's but it's for Snow Leopard 10.6.3 and up. The Mac version of Flash Player 10.1 ( with hardware accel. code name gala is in beta ) and will not be made available to later this year.

So in short upgrading to this release of 10.1 will NOT give you hardware accelerated H.264 playback on a Mac. It will however give you a better software based decoder that plays H.264 content better while using less CPU ( specially in fullscreen mode where they are in fact using OpenGL blit to the screen but only in fullscreen mode ).

Upgrading to this release for Mac users will improve drawing performance in a marked way since Adobe is using Core Animation. But be warned that this performance improvement is only for cocoa based browsers.

Lastly you will have a Flash Player release that address a security advisory posted last week.

Best performance scenario for your case would be to indeed upgrade to 10.1 and use a browser that supports cocoa API's in their plugin system like Google's Chrome or Apple's own Safari.

Hope this helps.
Cheers

So basically, upgrading won't screw anything up, even on the 9400? I'm currently on 10.0.45.2 or whatever the last release was.

I'm such a novice.

 

[AZREOSpecialist]

It's time for Adobe to die a slow and painful death.

 

[dru`]

Makes you wonder the point of that "Enable hardware acceleration" checkbox that's been in the Flash Settings for years.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Then how come this only works on 10.6.3 (after Apple shipped an update ) and only on the latest GPUs ?

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2267.html

If it existed long ago in the general Cocoa API why does Apple only support this on the latest bleeding edge OS drop and a limited subset of GPUs ?

There is a huge difference between dragging in Quicktime and sticking an additional layer of abstraction (moving your software and the decoder farther apart ) and simply being able to pump data through and getting a simple decoded buffer ( which can do overlays , etc. on).

Give this man a prize. Bingo. It's not like ANYONE was using those layers to do that because it's pointless. I think you'd also have to convert any codecs into Apple supported codecs to use it (why do you think we need Perian?) and that adds more layers. But certain fanatics on here will always without fail blame everyone but Apple on any given subject. Apple can do no wrong so of course they supported hardware APIs before now. That's why I can decode H264 with hardware on my mid-2008 era MBP with Quicktime (Guess what? I CANNOT) because they've had that support forever.

I do think Adobe should have probably waited a bit longer to have all their eggs in one basket (bad publicity as this thread shows), but then I doubt Adobe is terribly worried about the Mac market.

 

[iWonderwhy]

So if I download this, will I notice anything different when I view flash content?

 

[openhammer]

So basically, upgrading won't screw anything up, even on the 9400? I'm currently on 10.0.45.2 or whatever the last release was.

I'm such a novice.

Nope. On the contrary. Upgrading to 10.1 will mean more efficient playback of H.264 content. Accelerated playback of animated content via Core Animation and the latest most secure version of Flash ( the one you currently are running has a security vulnerability that was addressed in 10.1 ). I can so with the utmost confidence that upgrading to 10.1 will NOT have any adverse effects on your system or your browsing experience.

Cheers.

P.S. We are all novices at something or the other

 

[Yamcha]

Something that I dont get is this.

All you Mac owners moaning that Adobe sucks, and that flash is crap.

Why not uninstall Flash altogether?

Forget the pop-up blockers you so love to use, if you dont install it you wont have system issues and crashes on sites that use flash.

Surely thats the solution?

Then you can view pages like the iPad and iPhone does.

That's the way to stick it to Adobe, isnt it?

+1 exactly! I'm a fan of Apple but I'm not the type of person who defends Apple regardless of what the issue is..

Apple is a bit of a hypocrite, why not stop flash support on Safari & OSX all together?

Its not like all the websites out there are going to make the transition to HTML5 so quickly, It will take quite a bit of time, infact millions of websites that host video's still rely on flash.. not to mention the fact that not everyone switches to the latest version of a web browser, there a tons of people who are still using IE 6 + 7, alot of people use older versions of other browsers aswell, so they wouldn't be able to view those websites correctly, not all browsers have 100% support for CSS3 or HTML5 yet..

And also being an owner of an ipod touch, it really annoys me to know that there isn't flash support on that platform =/ I visit sites everyday that use flash.. And being a designer I know web standards are good, but again the transition isn't going to happen overnight, millions of site will still use flash, what are we supposed to do? wait a few years till they go HTML5??

 

[openhammer]

Makes you wonder the point of that "Enable hardware acceleration" checkbox that's been in the Flash Settings for years.

LOL, yea I know.... If memory serves me correctly though that is to enable the hardware acceleration of scaling video content in fullscreen. This has been hardware accelerated for a while, but Adobe is going through hooks in the OS to scale video data and not actually implementing the scaling algorithms themselves in the Flash Player.

 

[SAPPete]

You know, Adobe's not really helping their case with this.

Apple's pissing match with Adobe aside, this would have been an ample opportunity for Adobe to undermine Jobs' assertions about Flash and do something to change the public's perception.

So much for the consumer who's caught in between these two - it seems like our choices are Apple's pie-in-the-sky HTML5 or Adobe's crappy implementation of Macromedia's Flash.

Yeah, we need more companies than just Apple to make business decisions based on Steve being an ass.

 

[Amdahl]

Makes you wonder the point of that "Enable hardware acceleration" checkbox that's been in the Flash Settings for years.

I believe it was to enable hardware assisted scaling. This feature is what made full-screen video work without losing tons of frames.

So if I download this, will I notice anything different when I view flash content?

Most noticeable difference for a noob is that pages with many Flash elements load in a 'snappier' fashion.

 

[chuckm1020]

Just curious. Are flash updates like this one only available through Adobes Website or does apple ever put the new release on there Software Update through OSX?

 

[inkswamp]

+1 exactly! I'm a fan of Apple but I'm not the type of person who defends Apple regardless of what the issue is..

Apple is a bit of a hypocrite, why not stop flash support on Safari & OSX all together?

Apple's complaints have been, from the beginning, that Flash isn't ready for mobile devices.

Try to keep up.

 

[openhammer]

I believe it was to enable hardware assisted scaling. This feature is what made full-screen video work without losing tons of frames.

Most noticeable difference for a noob is that pages with many Flash elements load in a 'snappier' fashion.

And crashes a lot less os OS X. The Crash issues on Macs were mostly related to out of Memory issues when the Flash Plugin would run into the memory ceiling allocated by the browser to the plugin. 10.1 Manages that ceiling a lot more gracefully essentially shutting down instances of flash for you so you don't run into a crash.

Interestingly enough this crash issue plagues Mac users the most because we have the best browsing experience available on a desktop OS with safari's tab view and the stability of the OS means a lot of users have 30-40 Safari tab instances open with web content ( a lot of it having flash for video or banners ). Well this causes problems because eventually the Flash Plugin will run out of memory. Recognizing this issue Adobe addressed that specifically in 10.1, the added benefit being that Windows users can benefit from that as well as mobile users.

 

[qbert]

No hardware accel support (yet) because Apple is playing politics and dragging it's feet...

Lame, Jobs, very lame...

 

[openhammer]

Just curious. Are flash updates like this one only available through Adobes Website or does apple ever put the new release on there Software Update through OSX?

For Apple users that browse with Safari they must go to Adobe's download site to get the latest version of Flash. Chrome users get automatic updates.

 

[inkswamp]

No hardware accel support (yet) because Apple is playing politics and dragging it's feet...

Lame, Jobs, very lame...

100% agreed. It's a known fact that Steve Jobs has been sneaking into Adobe headquarters every night for 3 years and doing everything in his power to hold up progress on Flash. Evil bastard.

 

[nagromme]

Flash would still be a resource hog with or without .h264 acceleration. .h264 video was never Flash’s biggest or only performance problem! That’s a drop in the bucket. Flash ALWAYS spins up my fans, whether playing video or not—and video in .h264 hasn’t even been around all that long.

I know Adobe has been working on other improvements. They interest me more than .h264!

 

[inkswamp]

Won't be any more difficult. It's clear and visible code, won't be any hard to make an HTML5 Ad blocker. In fact, it'll be easier.

That's exactly what went through my mind when I read the previous comment. It will, in fact, be easier to create an ad blocker in HTML 5 than a Flash blocker. So many wrong-headed assumptions about HTML 5 floating around out there.

Hell, I use a CSS stylesheet already that blocks most ads: http://www.floppymoose.com/

EDIT: That page mentions a CSS stylesheet that blocks Flash ads.