Apple Opens Door to Hardware-Accelerated Decoding of H.264 Video in Flash

[pmz]

This applies to much much more than Flash, and in reality, probably won't apply to Flash much at all.

This will only serve to greatly improve the already great performance of HTML5, further distancing it from inferior/ancient technology.

Adobe probably isn't even interested in this at the moment. I'm sure they will also claim there isn't enough here to really improve Flash performance. (Of course it will be more than 'enough' for other developers of other standards, but that's beside the point).

 

[MorphingDragon]

Somthing just clicked.

Quicktime enhancement (Pills!).

 

[iBug2]

Sorry mate, but you don't have a clue. Deblocking specifically is defined by the h.264 standard in an awful, awful way that makes it impossible to run in parallel over the whole image using general programming tools like Cuda or Open CL; it has to be done in a 16x16 pixel block four stripes vertical, followed by four stripes horizontal (or the other way round, can't remember), then proceeding to the next block. No shortcuts possible because they will lead to very visible artefacts. And its right in the middle of the performance critical path. No chance to use general hardware in any meaningful way. On the other hand, the task is trivial enough so that specialised hardware doing just h.264 deblocking and nothing else fits easily on a tenth of a square millimetre on a chip.

That sounds weird. Since CUDA is already used to accelerate H.264 encoding by up to 10x, but it can't be used for decoding?

Are you saying that Nvidia Fermi supercomputer cannot play a H.264 video if it wasn't for the specific hardware to simply decode H.264 within the GPU's it uses?

 

[goosnarrggh]

I am confused, I thought Windows had DXVA support since XP? Where hardware acceleration is purely dependent on the hardware/drivers used. Is that not the case?

Heck, DXVA was originally standardized for Windows 2000, and it was backported to Windows 98. So the API was definitely there in XP.

But starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft released a new major version, DXVA 2.0. It adds additional features that make it more convenient for programmers to work with, but these new features are not backwards compatible with DXVA 1.0. Microsoft did not backport DXVA 2.0 to Windows XP, so the new features of 2.0 are only available in Vista and newer.

Apparently, Adobe's current implementation must make use of some of these new features, which means that wouldn't work with operating systems like Windows XP running DXVA 1.0.

Linux is an open source OS, developers have access to everything. Yet Flash on Linux runs even worse than on OS X.

Surely the H.264 part of the problem (and I know there are many more problems with Flash in Linux than just H.264) can be at least partially attributed to the fractured Linux marketplace. Historically there has been no single standard environment that Adobe could plan to use in its Linux development - some systems might use VDPAU, others might have an equivalent but incompatible framework such as XvBA. Others might have nothing of that nature at all.

In Windows, the API is standardized. Adobe doesn't need to know anything about the specific GPU that's actually installed in the system. Fundamentally, they can always use the same basic set of calls to the same API to access whatever level of acceleration happens to be available in that particular system.

In Linux... well, why would any business volunteer to burden itself with supporting a multitude of different competing methods of doing fundamentally the same thing? Recently, there have been efforts to unify them under a common API such as VA API - but it's all still very new, and it's probably not deployed widely enough for Adobe to be able to make a business case for spending money on supporting it.

 

[tdream]

The problem is that most issues people have with flash have nothing to do with H.264 acceleration.

The only API missing for Adobe was now allowed by Apple. But that's only going to GPU accelerate a certain codec. It has nothing to do with the overall sloppiness of Flash, which is totally on Adobe's shoulders.

Linux is an open source OS, developers have access to everything. Yet Flash on Linux runs even worse than on OS X.

It's about Adobe not giving the effort to improve flash on low marketshare systems.

It is and always was Adobe's fault.

Not to mention the windows hardware acceleration of flash is "coming soon" on 10.1 as well. So currently, no OS has that. Not just OS X. Seriously, how lazy are you? This has been discussed ten times on this thread, you still post without reading anything.

It's accelerated in hardware since 10.1 but it ran fine without the update.

Sloppiness is not a quantifiable term. Apple would rather have users running programs that use no cpu power whatsoever.

What is the point of upgrading to the i5 and i7 if you don't use it.

 

[tdream]

So to sum things up (so certain people don't get confused or misinform others)

1. Apple has been quite slow to provide H.264 acceleration API's to third party developers, hence most of the player software on Mac still cannot accelerate H.264 through the GPU. This includes the likes of Mplayer, VLC, Plex, Flash, etc.
Windows have had that support for about a year now and Linux has partial support...

Some good points. Though there is full support for Linux in XMBC. An atom cpu with 9400m can handle almost anything.

 

[Darkroom]

Exactly. Seems like the Windows trolls that infest this forum now want to spin the news to their benefit.

Nowhere in this news is it implied that Flash has sucked simply because of no access to this API...Flash has ALWAYS sucked and continues to suck, be it on Macs, Windows PCs or mobile devices.

ADOBE IS DEAD.

well that settles it. everyone, delete all of your creative works in progress and stop visiting flash sites because adobe is now dead. the great BRLawyer has spoken.

 

[Goona]

Flash is garbage on Windows too, sure its better than OSX but it ain't much better.

 

[jragosta]

Sloppiness is not a quantifiable term. Apple would rather have users running programs that use no cpu power whatsoever.

What is the point of upgrading to the i5 and i7 if you don't use it.

That's right. Let's just use crappy software because it's always possible to buy a faster computer.

And I'll just fire up my i7 iPhone, too.

So to sum things up (so certain people don't get confused or misinform others)

1. Apple has been quite slow to provide H.264 acceleration API's to third party developers, hence most of the player software on Mac still cannot accelerate H.264 through the GPU. This includes the likes of Mplayer, VLC, Plex, Flash, etc.
Windows have had that support for about a year now and Linux has partial support.



2. This has absolutely nothing to do with the terrible performance of Flash on Mac vs Windows, because there isn't H.264 acceleration on Flash for Windows right now either unless you are using 10.1 "beta". Same with Linux.
So Adobe has been quite late with incorporating H.264 acceleration into flash even though they could do it much earlier on Windows and Linux, where the API's have been available for a long time now.


3. This API Apple now provides won't speed up flash's vector animation, which most people have issues with to begin with. The sloppiness of websites made with flash won't change. That might change a bit with Adobe's recent efforts to improve flash, which initiated from the opportunity to port it to mobile platforms, which cannot handle flash at the moment due to phones having quite low CPU power compared to laptops/desktops. Hence the whole 10.1 development (the biggest update on history of flash). 10.1 will add vector acceleration on mobile phones, h.264 acceleration on mobile devices and desktop devices, and many other improvements.

4. For flash to perform as good as Windows on OS X, Adobe has to do much more than to incorporate Apple's new API. I have been testing 10.1 on my Mac and so far I'm not impressed. The CPU usage seem to be slightly less, but the general sloppiness of flash websites is still there.

QFT.

Flash brings my Core 2 Duo, 2.33 GHz, 3 GB system to its knees just viewing a 640x480x8 bit screen - with nothing moving at all. Just some popup menus. Just how in the heck is hardware acceleration going to fix that?

OMG, some of you are so funny.


You people just don't get it.
Why should I need hardware acceleration just to watch a video when ALL other apps can handle it without?

The reason for this post: While I had the front page of MacRumors open, there was this Flash animation running. Takes between 60% and 90% of the CPU all the time. The size of that animation is 720 x 90 pixels. That is 3.125% of 1080p video. The animation has actually no movement in it at all; it would be perfect for h.264 because 90% of the image doesn't change from one frame to the next. It would work beautifully as an animated GIF with 90's technology.

And anyone tries to tell me that Flash uses 60% to 90% of my CPU for this tiny image _because nasty Apple isn't giving them hardware-accelerated h.264 video_?

Exactly. Hardware acceleration is just another Adobe excuse for poor coding.

Of course, now that they have it, they'll find something else to blame Apple for. I suspect that this is just a calculated step on Apple's part to show just how much Adobe is lying.

 

[jragosta]

Unless Steve Jobs acts like a complete jerk, like he did with the iPhone, and waits until Adobe has put a lot of time, effort, and money into enhancements for the Mac, and then last minute Steve says "I changed my mind."

Apple didn't change its mind. They had rules that they thought were clear and Adobe tried to weasel out of following the rules, so Apple clarified them.

Apple can be a bit slow, but that not always bad, I still rather have stability than raw power. I leave raw unstable power to windows and pc's.

Particularly since any modern computer is far more powerful than most users need.

I used to be able to watch video on my PowerMac 8500. Not HD, but smotth video nonetheless. My current computer is at least 20 times more powerful - video should not be an issue with even half-hearted coding. I'd rather have stable software that uses 50% of the power of the computer than buggy software that uses 100% (and that's giving Adobe the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they'll actually be able to take advantage of it).

I see this as Apple's bait.

Adobe has been putting blame on Apple not giving them access to hardware acceleration and this act by Apple I feel is sort of like "there you go show us what you got!"

The ball is now on Adobe's court. Smart Apple, I believe this is analogous to letting the Opera browser on the app store.

Exactly.

The interesting thing is that others have been able to do hardware accelerated video on the Mac for years without these 'magic' APIs.

Pangea did it over 2 years ago, for example:
http://www.macworld.com/article/43549/2005/03/pangeavr.html

This is good news, however, people are saying that it has been Apple's fault for flash sucking on the Mac because they not allowing Adobe to use this API.
There are a few fallacies with this.
1) Apple didn't allow any 3rd party developer to access this API until very recently. Why should Adobe get special treatment?
2) There are API's Adobe could have used before to optimize for the Mac, such as CoreVideo and CoreAnimation. Instead, they choose to make it a poorly-done port of the Windows version. I understand they are working on fixing it but it doesn't change the fact that there are useful OSX API's available to them.
3) Even if Flash wasn't a resource hog, and had access to these API's in the first place, it's buggy as f**k. Winni said that flash never crashed his browser (or in some cases, the plug in alone crashes, because the SL version of safari has crash resistance). I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that never happened to you. But you must do really light web browsing on light-flash/ no flash sights, because flash crashes ALL THE TIME. Just an hour ago, I was watching a youtube video, and I wanted to collapse an animated ad (which was flash, btw) and flash crashed (luckily my windows stayed in tact, because of crash resistance). Most of the I'm not as lucky, and flash crashes the web browser I'm using entirely. I think most people can agree flash is buggy on the Mac. And having access to more API's won't fix those bugs.
Therefore, we can conclude it is Adobe's fault that flash on the Mac sucks, period. Summary, if for some reason you didn't comprehend my post: There were already API's available on OSX that Adobe could use to make flash more efficient, and even if it ran efficiently, having access to API's won't fix it's bugginess.

See above. Pangea (and lots of others) have been able to do it with published APIs. Why can't Adobe? For that matter, how does Adobe explain the fact that Flash uses 120% CPU even when doing nothing? Hardware acceleration won't help that. Heck, why is it that Photoshop can sling around multi MB images at 16 or 24 bit color depths without any difficulty but Flash chokes the computer even with a simple non-moving 640x480 screen? Can THAT be blamed on access to APIs? I don't think so.

I don't see the relevance of Core Video or Core Animation. If I'm not mistaken neither provide any hardware acceleration for the actual decoding of video or image data, which is the point of this MacRumors article. Core Video seems to be used for compositing and applying filters to existing decoded video frames while Core Animation takes as inputs the start and end scenes and interpolates the transitions.

You are mistaken. Core Video uses hardware acceleration. See:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/libr...tual/CoreVideo/CVProg_Intro/CVProg_Intro.html

Core Video is specifically recommended ONLY when hardware acceleration is available. If you read through that document, you'll see that Core Video uses OpenGL to actually do the grunt work - and OpenGL is hardware accelerated.

 

[Anuba]

The reason for this post: While I had the front page of MacRumors open, there was this Flash animation running. Takes between 60% and 90% of the CPU all the time. The size of that animation is 720 x 90 pixels.

Uhh... I'm looking at a newspaper website right now (www.aftonbladet.se) with 18 Flash banners on the front page, all animated, the largest being 982x240, some following me around when I scroll. Activity monitor is showing 14-15% CPU for Flash when the window is open, 4% when it's hidden. That's with Flash Player 10.1 RC2, Safari, SL, MBP 17" 2.8 GHz dualcore. If a single 720x90 banner is using 60-90% CPU, then never mind Flash, your entire computer needs an enema.

Exactly. Hardware acceleration is just another Adobe excuse for poor coding.

Right, because hardware acceleration makes no difference whatsoever.

Remember Mac graphics before the Quartz engine and Windows before Vista Aero? That's what you have to work with without hardware acceleration. No alpha effects, no drop shadows, no nifty transitions, just dry, hard pixel graphics. I guess MacOS 9 desktop graphics were the result of "poor coding" on Apple's part?

Flash does all those effects anyway, but entirely in software so it's all down to the CPU. That is, until 10.1 for Windows, and 10.X (2?) on Mac (the door was opened yesterday so don't expect a revamped Mac version tomorrow).

In 10.1, not only video content but vector drawing will be done by the GPU instead of the CPU, and images will also be accelerated when possible. This is *the* most important feature for everyone who has gripes with pages with lots of Flash banners hogging resources. But for now that's only for Windows, due to Apple having kept the door shut until now.

That doesn't mean the Mac version will be as crummy as before -- all other enhancements are beneficial to Mac users as well:

- 10.1 will not use video resources for off-screen content (previous Flash players would keep processing full blast even if the window was hidden or out of view in some other manner, e.g. news site front pages that are way longer than the screen can show). It will still play the audio part of off-screen content, obviously.

- 10.1 prevents out-of-memory browser crashes by shutting down instances where a SWF attempts to allocate more memory than is available on the device. This is the main reason why Flash crashes browsers, so expect stability to be in a whole other league.

Overall memory and CPU usage is down 86% since the previous version, and TBH most of this work was to get Flash onto mobile devices like phones and low-end netbooks, but of course users of desktops and laptops benefit from the optimizations as well.

 

[Goona]

Apparently Adobe has decided no more products for Mac. I can't help but think this is Apple responding.

We'll see who will be the first to crawl with that wise decision.

 

[John.B]

Actually, that's not quite true.

It has always been possible to do hardware acceleration using Apple's APIs. Adobe wants to bypass Apple's protection layer and hit the hardware directly.

Either way, you get hardware acceleration. With Adobe's way, you bypass Apple's APIs and get a few percent extra performance - at the cost of greatly increased instability and insecurity.

I still can't figure out how it's Apple's fault that Adobe's Photoshop team has no problem using Apple's APIs for hardware acceleration and can sling multi MB (16 or 24 bit) images around with no trouble, but when Flash tries to open a 640x480x8 bit image, it sends the CPU through the roof.

Exactly right on all points.

As unstable as Flash has been on my Macs, I really don't want them to have kernel-level access to anything. To have Flash crash a browser or tab in a browser is one thing, to allow them to crash the whole of OSX would be unconscionable.

 

[eskalation.dk]

How does Adobe explain the fact that Flash uses 120% CPU even when doing nothing?

Flash chokes the computer even with a simple non-moving 640x480 screen?

Prove it, you have no clue what you are talking about!

You can find entire websites built in Flash that uses 5-6% of the CPU at best when they have no animation, saying that flash uses up to 120% of the CPU when doing nothing IS NOT POSSIBLE, how could it be?!

Please prove me wrong, but i know you can't!

Besides: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/20...ontent-across-browsers-and-operating-systems/ The difference between HTML5 and Flash when playing 1080P videos is not that big!

 

[John.B]

Apparently Adobe has decided no more products for Mac. I can't help but think this is Apple responding.

Really? John Nack (Photoshop development manager at Adobe) has said revenues for the CS product lines is split approx. 50/50 between Mac and Windows. Do you really think Adobe would survive with half the creatives revenue stream? Or was that just a knee-jerk reaction of the type expected from an eight year-old after a playground spat that you just made up?

 

[Earendil]

I don't think you understand how it all works. Things are not that simple. On windows when I play a flash video all the work is done on the CPU, when I play it of my computer the work is done on the CPU and GPU. Hardware acceleration simply means that it's going to play the video the same way it plays when you play it from your computer.

When the GPU and CPU share the workload the video flows better, the computer remains more snappy and doesn't get too hot, so you avoid the fans revving up to jet engine mode.

*snip*

Flash before and after hardware acceleration is like Mac desktop graphics before and after the Quartz engine. Flash has to draw stuff MacOS 9/WinXP style when it can't utilize hardware acceleration.

You both missed his point. The point is that:
1. No other application has had this hardware acceleration, and they don't have the problems that Flash does.
2. This is video acceleration only, it will not help Flash with any of its animation.
3. Though Windows may have had similar APIs available, Adobe has only recently taken advantage of them in software that is still in Beta.

So you see, Flash has been sloppy for at least 4 or 5 years, I know, I was there. Undoubtedly this is a good thing for all software developers, but it doesn't let Adobe off the hook for their ability to code decent software for OSX over the past couple years, since every other developer has been able to pull it off without these low level calls.

 

[Earendil]

You can find entire websites built in Flash that uses 5-6% of the CPU at best when they have no animation, saying that flash uses up to 120% of the CPU when doing nothing IS NOT POSSIBLE, how could it be?!

I was almost with you until your last line, in which I realized that you too have no clue what you are talking about

Ask a software developer how hard they work (on big projects) to keep their program from eating CPU cycles and memory when the program isn't "doing" anything. I'm not about to agree with the original fellow, because I haven't honestly looked at CPU cycles while Flash is idling. However it is easily within the realm of possibility. Just thought you should know

 

[jragosta]

Uhh... I'm looking at a newspaper website right now (www.aftonbladet.se) with 18 Flash banners on the front page, all animated, the largest being 982x240, some following me around when I scroll. Activity monitor is showing 14-15% CPU for Flash when the window is open, 4% when it's hidden. That's with Flash Player 10.1 RC2, Safari, SL, MBP 17" 2.8 GHz dualcore. If a single 720x90 banner is using 60-90% CPU, then never mind Flash, your entire computer needs an enema.

....

Overall memory and CPU usage is down 86% since the previous version, and TBH most of this work was to get Flash onto mobile devices like phones and low-end netbooks, but of course users of desktops and laptops benefit from the optimizations as well.

Or maybe everyone else is talking about a version of Flash that is in use - you know, released by Adobe rather than a beta.

If Adobe fixes the problems, that will be great. But it's foolish to pretend that the problems never existed just because you're claiming to be using some beta that may or may not ever be released.

Not to mention that EVEN IF WE BELIEVE ADOBE, 10.1 won't run on iPhones, anyway - it requires an 800 MHz A8. So, even if we believe Adobe's vapor promises, the iPhone (along with >99% of phones in customers hands today), Flash requires too much horsepower to run.

So how is it Apple's fault that Flash won't run on any phone less than 800 MHz A8 - or any Symbian or Windows Mobile 7 phone regardless of CPU?

Right, because hardware acceleration makes no difference whatsoever.

Here's a hint for you. You should know you've lost the argument when you have to make things up and pretend that the other person said them. You might as well fold.

No one ever said that hardware acceleration makes no difference. The points which various people have made are:

1. Other companies can do plenty, including video playback without hardware acceleration.

2. The APIs that Adobe was whining about only affect video - so they will have no impact on things like static menus - which are also problems for Flash.

3. Even if video acceleration were necessary, it's possible to do it without requiring hardware access as Adobe has demanded. Read up on OpenGL and Core Video.

4. The video acceleration issue completely ignores all the other problems with Flash - it's insecure and unstable.

 

[hayesk]

I hope the fanboys take note of this. Flash sucks on OSX because of Apple. I've used it on Windows for years, and it runs perfectly. Hopefully this will go to alleviate some of the differences.

I hope the anti-Mac fanboys can explain why VLC on my Mac has been able to play video at much higher resolution and framerates than Flash using much less RAM and CPU time than Flash, all without hardware acceleration.

 

[jragosta]

You can find entire websites built in Flash that uses 5-6% of the CPU at best when they have no animation, saying that flash uses up to 120% of the CPU when doing nothing IS NOT POSSIBLE, how could it be?!

How could it be? Adobe writes crappy software. That's how.

I don't really care if you believe me. There are thousands of other reports of Flash pegging CPU monitors even when not doing anything visible (I guess I should have made it clear that Flash was obviously doing SOMETHING, but there was nothing going on on the screen - it was just a static menu page).

I'll even give you the page: go to www.webkinz.com and log in. On my MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3 GB, running 10.6.3, the CPU usage sits between 110 and 120% - simply looking at the menu page. That is consistent with the fact that the computer gets very, very warm to the touch within a couple of minutes.

Now, if you want to have a rational discussion, I'd suggest that you stop accusing people of lying just because you don't like what they said - or even if it doesn't agree with your own experience.

 

[eskalation.dk]

I was almost with you until your last line, in which I realized that you too have no clue what you are talking about

Ask a software developer how hard they work (on big projects) to keep their program from eating CPU cycles and memory when the program isn't "doing" anything. I'm not about to agree with the original fellow, because I haven't honestly looked at CPU cycles while Flash is idling. However it is easily within the realm of possibility. Just thought you should know

I do program websites in ActionScript myself, yes, garbage collection is important, but if you remember to remove unused eventlisteners and children, then the website won't require over 10% of the CPU even when the entire website is loaded and the images are stored in the cache, and no animations are being made...

 

[Eidorian]

I find it interesting that the GT330M in the new MacBook Pros is mentioned as supporting H.264 acceleration, but the lower power integrated Intel IGP isn't. And before people jump to blame poor quality Intel IGPs, Arrandale's IGP fully supports H.264 acceleration, it's actually the 2nd generation Intel IGP with this feature. It's simply that Apple doesn't implement the drivers to support it in OS X. If the point of dynamic IGP switching is to apply the right IGP/GPU for the specific task to save power, something that is now as basic as H.264 acceleration should not require powering up the discrete GPU and using more power.

In terms of GPU support, besides the nVidia 8xxx, GT1xx, and GTX285 supporting full H.264 acceleration in hardware, all ATI GPUs from the HD2xxx series and up also can do full H.264 acceleration. Even the ATI X1000 and nVidia 7000 series have partial hardware H.264 acceleration ability. Just that Apple doesn't write the drivers for it.

On another note, does the Video Decode Acceleration framework having a C programming interface imply that Carbon isn't dead after-all and that it is useful for these lower-level functions?

Well, considering that the video acceleration framework is merely just the Nvidia library but made available for Mac OS X - Apple is more reliant on the vendors than I think people here realise. About the only explanation I can think of is Apple having a contract which limits Nvidia as to what their responsibility is.

I suspect Apple has only put forth a minimal effort on the already existing VDPAU libraries. The limited hardware support is a very strong encouragement to purchase a new Mac even if you have the PureVideo hardware. No love for the Mac Pro.

You're still limited to using UVD/2 under Windows.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Heck, why is it that Photoshop can sling around multi MB images at 16 or 24 bit color depths without any difficulty but Flash chokes the computer even with a simple non-moving 640x480 screen?

You know, I do some Flash development on a Mac and I can't replicate this "choke". Could you point me to a "simple, non-moving 640 x 480 screen" .swf file that will "choke" my Mac? Or perhaps we have different interpretations of what "choke" means?

Worse, I build some reasonably complicated (animated, interactive, etc) Flash stuff (to render in even bigger than 640 x 480 screens) like: http://www.biginnovations.com/player.html and while it does run more fluidly on Windows machines vs. Macs (no arguing that), I just tested that on an old 1Ghz PowerMac G4 and it ran OK. I can't do that same video in H.264 without the file size (and thus download "buffering" delay) skyrocketing, and H.264 alone can't support even the simple interactive features built into that presentation.

Further, with all the "100% CPU" whinings, I fired up Activity Monitor in my (and your) Utilities folder and couldn't ever get it to hit 100% on CPU usage (even on that 1Ghz G4 with an 7+ year old graphics card). It did hit 65%-85%. But then I went to Apple's website, Quick Time trailers, Sea Rex trailer and chose 480p to try to get close the same playback width & height (but not quite as big of a playback screen). I watched the CPU usage in Activity Monitor again and it never fell below 85%, often showing 90%-100% (very often at 99%)

Now clearly that's also an unfair comparison as the latter is a true streaming video while the former only has spot video, but the former is running in a bigger screen (width & height) and it still gets its intended job done (even with a poorer frame rate playing back on a Mac). And the former is about 29 minutes of visual playback packaged at about 26Mb total file size (0.9 Mb/minute), while the latter is only 1 minute of visual playback packaged at about 13Mb (13Mb/minute).

Could I render that same kind of thing in HTML5 + H.264 + javascript? Yes. But the download bandwidth would have to be a lot bigger and the user would need a lot more patience while all that video downloaded. Furthermore, HTML5 only works well(?) on just a small amount of browser clients right now, while Flash-based versions of interactive content will run on about 97% of all computers and in just about all browsers (other than iphone, ipod touch, and iPad-- and only because Apple chooses that users of such devices shall not even have the option for Flash playback).

I understand we are all Apple fans here. Me too. And we want to justify everything Apple does as right, and all things everyone else does that seems in any way against Apple as wrong. But facts is facts. Try the above yourself- even on your oldest working hardware. You all have activity monitor in your Utilities folder. If your own testing shows that Quicktime is more of a CPU hog than Flash, does that mean we should be posting comments like "Die Quicktime Die"?

I also understand that perhaps things are different on the latest hardware with Snow Leopard. So I fired up the latest gen iMac with the 4850 graphics card and ran the same test. The Flash presentation seemed to peg in the 60's (% of CPU usage) with an occasional spike into the 70s, but never all the way to 100%. The trailer in Safari (Quicktime) seemed to hang in the teens. So on the latest hardware I could see a significant superiority of CPU minimization of Quicktime playing the trailer vs. the Flash presentation. But the bigger width & height Flash presentation NEVER hit 100%, and even the latest hardware doesn't improve the problem of Mb/minute one bit.

Key to this comparison is considering how few people in the world own the latest & greatest hardware & software (and how few of those people have the ability to properly display HTML5 + H.264 + javascript now, 6 months from now, and 6 months after that, compared to how people still clinging to computers older than yesterday, 6 months or even 6 years ago can display rich, animated media, elearning, interactive presentations, etc. in Flash media in pretty good form on a wide variety of Macs and Windows machines.

I won't even go into how that Flash presentation doesn't seem to turn either computer's fans into "jet engines", etc (I don't even think they kicked into any higher speed at all), nor how it won't seem to EVER crash Safari on either computer- no matter how many times I test it (and certainly not "3-4 times every day", etc "all because of the sloppy coding of Flash").

That Flash presentation won't play at all on iPhones, Touch and iPad, but only because Apple decides for us that it can't run on those devices. It will play pretty well on about 97% of all computers- even old ones- throughout the world... including that huge population of people that are still using dialup. A 26Mb H.264 video via a 28K-56K dialup connection faces a "buffering" wait too long for many to tolerate.

I'm generally with Apple on many things, but not ALL things. This move to open up the H.264 option to others is certainly a good move. All this other Flash bashing because Apple currently doesn't like Flash- especially when "facts" are thrown around that don't seem to actually prove out when put to the test- is blindly following "The Steve" rather than thinking through what is really best for everyone (beyond ourselves). If The Steve tells you your significant other is ugly next week, will you dump her or him?

 

[eskalation.dk]

How could it be? Adobe writes crappy software. That's how.

I don't really care if you believe me. There are thousands of other reports of Flash pegging CPU monitors even when not doing anything visible (I guess I should have made it clear that Flash was obviously doing SOMETHING, but there was nothing going on on the screen - it was just a static menu page).

I'll even give you the page: go to www.webkinz.com and log in. On my MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3 GB, running 10.6.3, the CPU usage sits between 110 and 120% - simply looking at the menu page. That is consistent with the fact that the computer gets very, very warm to the touch within a couple of minutes.

Now, if you want to have a rational discussion, I'd suggest that you stop accusing people of lying just because you don't like what they said - or even if it doesn't agree with your own experience.

It isn't Adobe who writes crappy software, its the developers that write crappy websites! Unfortunately i can't log in to that website as it requires a "pet-code", and i do believe that a website made using flash can use up excessive amounts of CPU, but that is due to bad coding on the developers side, not Adobes! When animation is actually a feasible and cross-browser/platform supported possibility, my guess is that the same thing will happen to html5 websites! The developers are reponsible for the optimization, but some people just don't know how to do it.

The reason why i reacted the way i did (and i still believe i have the full right to do so), is that you said that it was when flash was doing nothing! Flash clearly is doing something in the background if it takes up that much of your CPU, but the developers who made this are clearly incapable of writing proper ActionScript! I would wish that i could see the website but i can't login.

 

[alent1234]

How could it be? Adobe writes crappy software. That's how.

I don't really care if you believe me. There are thousands of other reports of Flash pegging CPU monitors even when not doing anything visible (I guess I should have made it clear that Flash was obviously doing SOMETHING, but there was nothing going on on the screen - it was just a static menu page).

I'll even give you the page: go to www.webkinz.com and log in. On my MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3 GB, running 10.6.3, the CPU usage sits between 110 and 120% - simply looking at the menu page. That is consistent with the fact that the computer gets very, very warm to the touch within a couple of minutes.

Now, if you want to have a rational discussion, I'd suggest that you stop accusing people of lying just because you don't like what they said - or even if it doesn't agree with your own experience.

Flash is the best cross platform dev environment. it runs on Windows, OS X, Linux and other OS's. On each OS it supports several versions back and multiple browsers each with different ways of doing the same thing.

if HTML5 is going be just as popular, wait a few years. it's going to have the same issues as people have to code in backward compatibility and it uses the most common instructions of all the platforms.