Adobe Suggests Disabled Hardware Acceleration for Flash Player in OS X Lion

[KnightWRX]

So are you asserting that Microsoft had access to information Adobe did not (because the performance advantage existed for well over a year) or that Microsoft is much better at performance tuning their applications then Adobe?

Or I'm suggesting Microsoft didn't have a need for decoded frames because Silverlight does much less and no post-processing, and thus they used QTKit. Try to follow here.

Your claim was that Adobe sucked because they did not have access to VDA, and then you claimed silverlight worked good because it used VDA (a year or more before Apple opened up access to it). You make a lot of interesting leaps in logic.

I said either VDA (which appeared in 10.6.3, in April 2010) or QTKit (which doesn't allow post-processing of frames). Now if you have experience with Silverlight doing HW accelerated H.264 prior to 10.6.3, then it is obviously not using VDA, but QTKit and just means Microsoft had less needs than Adobe (and thus, that Silverlight is just less powerful than Flash).

God it's so hard with some people. Do you even have knowledge of programming on OS X or am I arguing with someone that's completely green here ?

I am against Apple monopoly. We, consumers, have the right to choose which product should stay. Personally Steve doesn't like flash, but this doesn't mean we hate flash. Give us back flash with hardware acceleration! I don't want mac os x lion to become iLion!

Again guys, cool it with the name calling. Apple probably didn't do this on purpose, no more than Adobe is just being lazy.

 

[munkery]

That is actually talking about QTKit. Unfortunately, it is a high level API, and did not give back decoded frames to the applications. Flash cannot use something like QTKit because it requires post-processing of frames for adding overlays and other stuff. It required an API that decoded on a frame by frame basis.

Hence VDA. Hence their adoption as soon as it was released.

Wasn't QTKit replaced by AVFoundation? Is this the issue? Adobe has to modify Flash to use new API?

 

[spazzcat]

The Framework itself has not been updated according to the documentation, it's still the same it was and is supported as long as you're running 10.6.3 and later according to Apple :

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/

The framework itself is not overly complicated. Something is amiss here. It could be this broke in the GM and it could just be a bug, let's not start name calling either Apple or Adobe here, bugs happen.

Flash has never worked right in Lion.

 

[tuhoops]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/9A5259f)

The reverse scrolling comment is just snarky. It has nothing to do with Adobe's products. For a third-party to tell users to disable a feature that the actual OS maker thought should be default under the guise of "its confusing" is lame.

Maybe so, but that's the first thing I disabled. Reverse scrolling may be nice on a laptop, but on my iMac, it was terrible. I use a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, and for a desktop, it is the best way for me to interact with the OS. I know Steve is calling this the "post pc era" but as for now, the desktop is still the backbone of the technology market. Most households have one, or a laptop equivalent. I know this is changing, and I like where we're going, but if you're going to develop an OS for a desktop / laptop, then these things are necessary. I would've had reverse scrolling and resume off by default, but I'm glad there's a choice, and realize that they're trying to push people from their old ways.

Lion is a step in the direction of one OS for all Apple products. No more OSX, no more iOS, just Apple OS. But until then, the hardware that's out there has to change, and that will take time. Lion, in that regard, is brilliant.

 

[KnightWRX]

Wasn't QTKit replaced by AVFoundation? Is this the issue? Adobe has to modify Flash to use new API?

Flash uses VDA which according to the documentation is unmodified.

Flash has never worked right in Lion.

Doesn't mean anything. Again, could be an Apple problem, could be an Adobe problem, could be a little bit of both. All is probably not intentional and being worked on. If people would just calm down the hate...

 

[TennisandMusic]

Worst. Feature. Ever.

I disagree. It felt very stupid to me at first, but once you get used too it their name for the feature makes sense: "Natural scrolling." Especially with a magic trackpad, it feels more like you are physically interacting with your screen, just like an iPhone. Same thing for going "back" in Safari. You swipe to the right. But it's like you're pushing pages on and off the screen and makes more physical sense. I'm guessing plenty of people who thought it was dumb (like me) are going to grow to think it's awesome (like me). Give it a chance.

 

[BaldiMac]

And seriously, he called them lazy over Flash, when it required Apple to ship a framework to help fix... and when Apple did, Adobe implemented it in less than a week.

Are we still pretending that hardware acceleration of h.264 video was the only problem with Flash? And the only possible thing Jobs could have been referring to with his comment?

 

[igator210]

I am against Apple monopoly. We, consumers, have the right to choose which product should stay. Personally Steve doesn't like flash, but this doesn't mean we hate flash. Give us back flash with hardware acceleration! I don't want mac os x lion to become iLion!

I want a BMW with a Lotus engine. Not gonna happen. Apple supplies hardware and software. That is there right as a private company. We, as consumers might disagree, but its hardly a monopoly. We can go get a Dell or HP (or whatever else) if we are unhappy with Apple.

 

[spazzcat]

I am against Apple monopoly. We, consumers, have the right to choose which product should stay. Personally Steve doesn't like flash, but this doesn't mean we hate flash. Give us back flash with hardware acceleration! I don't want mac os x lion to become iLion!

APIs how do they work, this is Adobe problem not Apple, every new OS APIs change, I have used all the betas of Lion and Flash has never worked right. It's Adobe job to upgrade their software and have it ready when a new OS comes out. This one of main reasons companies have betas.

 

[spazzcat]

I disagree. It felt very stupid to me at first, but once you get used too it their name for the feature makes sense: "Natural scrolling." Especially with a magic trackpad, it feels more like you are physically interacting with your screen, just like an iPhone. Same thing for going "back" in Safari. You swipe to the right. But it's like you're pushing pages on and off the screen and makes more physical sense. I'm guessing plenty of people who thought it was dumb (like me) are going to grow to think it's awesome (like me). Give it a chance.

On the trackpad I like it, on my mouse I hate it.

 

[cambox]

Reason 454

Another reason not to install Lion.

 

[fishmoose]

I don't use an Adobe products anymore, if they can't be bothered to make them work on the platform of my choice - I can't be bothered buying them.

 

[KnightWRX]

APIs how do they work, this is Adobe problem not Apple, every new OS APIs change, I have used all the betas of Lion and Flash has never worked right. It's Adobe job to upgrade their software and have it ready when a new OS comes out. This one of main reasons companies have betas.

VDA hasn't changed. Again :

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/

Care to point out the changes ? It's not an overly complicated framework.

 

[zgh1999]

So much farking problems with Adobe.

Adobe should just kill off Flash and get the problem over and done with.

How much time does Adobe need to fix a piece of software?

If Adobe doesn't want to kill off Flash, Apple will be happy to do it for ya.

 

[whooleytoo]

I disagree. It felt very stupid to me at first, but once you get used too it their name for the feature makes sense: "Natural scrolling." Especially with a magic trackpad, it feels more like you are physically interacting with your screen, just like an iPhone. Same thing for going "back" in Safari. You swipe to the right. But it's like you're pushing pages on and off the screen and makes more physical sense. I'm guessing plenty of people who thought it was dumb (like me) are going to grow to think it's awesome (like me). Give it a chance.

I think the new scrolling 'orientation' makes sense on touch-screens, to view the bottom of a document you 'drag' it upwards to reveal the bottom as you might with a piece of paper. I think that comparison doesn't really hold on non-touchscreen devices like Macs.

I guess it's good to have consistency, though I'm going from Mac <-> iPhone/iPad all day and never get it wrong.

 

[Dr McKay]

Flash has never worked good on OSX. Barely works on Windows

Funny, I have never had Flash cause a crash on Windows, and even 1080p Flash videos use about 10-20% of my CPU.

Bash it all you want for OS X, but the fact is it works well on Windows.

 

[wovel]

Are we still pretending that hardware acceleration of h.264 video was the only problem with Flash? And the only possible thing Jobs could have been referring to with his comment?

He is. The fact that Flash still massively underpefromed the competition after Apple gave them everything they asked for is irrelevant.

 

[munkery]

Speculation that hardware acceleration is disabled:

Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. Possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration.

Someone previously posted that YouTube is h.264 played in Flash via a wrapper.

Youtube: The movies are encoded with H264 and they use a Flash wrapper around the video. This is the case with most video sites on the net. Just remove the Flash wrapper and there would not be a problem.

And, VDA is used by Flash.

Important: The Video Decode Acceleration framework only decodes video frame data and does not provide video playback or stream parsing capabilities. Using the QTKit QTMovie object with QTMovieOpenForPlaybackAttribute enabled is the recommended way for applications to automatically access GPU accelerated playback of H.264 encoded media.

So, it appears that QTKit was possibly involved in the hardware acceleration for YouTube.

Is it possible that the switch to AVFoundation is part of the issue?

 

[toppernh]

Has anyone tried Flash Player 11 Beta for Desktops on Lion? Does it have the same issue? Maybe Adobe fixed stuff in there to work correctly with Lion?

 

[iSee]

Worst. Feature. Ever.

The old direction of scrolling never made sense to me: you're finger gestures up, the screen scrolls down, you're finger goes down, the screen scrolls up. Huh?!?

I know we were all used to it, but it never made sense.

(I also understand how it came to be -- it's as if the gesure controls a cursor and the content scrolls to move under the cursor. However, the gesture doesn't actually control a cursor -- it's controlling an invisible "point of attention).

Now your gesture is moving the content -- it actually finally makes some sense.

I know it's hard sometimes to let go of stuff you're used to but this make so much more sense.

 

[dguisinger]

Plug-ins run outside of Safari's process space. Use your brain for once ?

EDIT : gak, you made me open Safari, what a piece of crap.

Not to burst your bubble, but:

1) Generally speaking with most operating systems, a process spun off by another process runs at the same or lower privilage levels, if Safari is running at lower privillages it would most likely be running Flash at a lower privilage level.

2) Why on earth would Safari running in a sandbox start a seperate process outside of a sandbox? That would violate their security redesign


I am using my brain; next time take a screen shot from Lion which has a Sandbox column instead of acting like your Snow Leopard install is how Lion works.

Everything so far indicates that the APIs didn't change, that Safari did change, that Sandboxing is now used, and oh look at that, when running as a Safari plug-in, Flash can't access hardware.

Its pretty clear where the problem is and that Adobe is too lazy to update Flash during the 6 months of developer previews.

 

[kiljoy616]

I'm sorry, but this is just sad. Adobe is not some small no name developer. Apple has put out pre-release development builds of Lion for a while before its release. Adobe had plenty of time to put out a Lion compatible update. These comments make it sound like Adobe is just thinking about the implications of Lion now, after it's official release. They seriously dropped the ball here...

Oh I don't know this is Adobe after all. Nothing new here.

 

[swift93]

I downloaded Lion yesterday to my 4 month old MBAir and discovered my fan running for extended periods. Apparently, click for flash isn't compatible with Lion yet?

After uninstalling Flash my fan shut off.

 

[Swift]

This is the capper

At the end of this snotty little PR release, they say they are "considering" how to adopt some of the new capabilities of Lion. The developer builds have been in their hands for months. As many have noted, this is just the way Adobe has been operating with Apple since they took so long writing their stuff for OS X, and only did it at all by being offered the Carbon interface, with was a kludge put together for companies with large code bases who would find it easier to rewrite their OS9 applications if they could use most of what they'd written so far. But that interface is clunky, old-fashioned, 32-bit, and of its nature, buggy. It's a short-term KLUDGE! Adobe has limped along on the Mac by dragging its feet on making the effort necessary for a Cocoa, 64-bit application, which would be much easier to keep up-to-date as OS X evolves.

That's the kind of company that Adobe has become: dragging its feet, frightened of code, lazy as hell, and downright derisive of the computer that got Adobe started, before the bean counters and the business sharks began running it into the ground. They are all about the power of legacy, nothing more. Long live Pixelmator and HTML5!

 

[munkery]

1) Generally speaking with most operating systems, a process spun off by another process runs at the same or lower privilage levels, if Safari is running at lower privillages it would most likely be running Flash at a lower privilage level.

You can configure Activity Monitor in Lion to show the processes that are sandboxed. The Flash process is not sandboxed.

2) Why on earth would Safari running in a sandbox start a seperate process outside of a sandbox? That would violate their security redesign.

The rendering and scripting engines are sandboxed in Safari. These provide the greatest attack surface so this is good. These are becoming the most attacked parts of the browser (see JavaScript).

Removing Flash to another process limits the resources it has to access if it is exploited so this is good. On its own, Flash apparently does not offer much to work with.