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

TennisandMusic said:
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.
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i hope you realize that flash sucks on apple independent of OS X. flash runs better on windows machines even if they don't have hardware acceleration. it's just adobe being a sucky company that provided a lousy product for many years. this could cost them market dominace now although that is not sure yet.
 
swarmster said:
Windows' Flash has only had hardware acceleration since 10.1. What caused Flash to suck on Mac OS for all the versions before that?
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Shhh... logic is not welcome when Apple-bashing is available instead ;)

(And since when was H.264 video playback the only thing that was slow on Flash for Mac? In fact, it’s the one thing about Flash that has NOT run slowly on Mac in my experience: it may have burned CPU cycles needlessly but it got the job done. Unlike other Flash tasks that have been downright sluggish.)

TennisandMusic said:
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.
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Not so. This is one factor among many (and the tests prove it). First, video is NOT the only thing that runs poorly in Flash. Animation too suffers. Second, in the “years” you’ve been using Windows, how many machines have even had hardware 264 acceleration enabled? Yet compare two machines without that acceleration, and you’ll see the Mac version suffering vs. the Windows version. So the changes Adobe is finally making are NOT just about this one specific situation. They’re fixing things they COULD have fixed years ago.

With Adobe working on some of the inefficiencies (which they are finally doing) and Apple helping with this particular factor, things are looking good!
 
TennisandMusic said:
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.
Click to expand...

Flash did not have hardware acceleration on windows until 10.1 beta either, which has been released couple of months ago. So it has absolutely nothing to do with Apple that flash works more crippled on Mac. It's totally Adobe's laziness.
 
Consultant said:
The problem is content in these formats do not need hardware acceleration.

Works fine without hardware acceleration:
mp4
avi
mkv
silverlight
etc.

But somehow flash NEEDS it to perform on par? Could it just be that Flash is a bloated piece of inefficient software?
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Those formats do need acceleration unless you want your fans to hit 4000 RPM.

mysticalos said:
as for windows, of course windows stuff runs better. Windows lets developers access pretty much anything they want, but how many programs have caused entire OS to fail, blue screen, hang etc cause of this access?
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Not since before Windows XP and I rarely need to reboot for video driver updates under Windows 7.

whooleytoo said:
Sure. But I'm wondering about Macs with integrated & discrete graphics.

With no hardware acceleration, the CPU would be busy, but the discrete graphics chip might be powered down. With hardware acceleration, the CPU would be less busy, but the discrete graphics chip would be on.

I don't know if the gain from the CPU being a bit less busy would be offset by having to power on the discrete graphics.
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I wouldn't be terribly concerned with the power consumption of UVD and Pure Video hardware compared to the CPU at 80-100%.
 
Well, there goes Adobe’s latest excuse for poor Flash performance on the Mac. Hopefully, Flash 10.2 will support it.
 
swarmster said:
Windows' Flash has only had hardware acceleration since 10.1. What caused Flash to suck on Mac OS for all the versions before that?
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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.
 
The Video Decode Acceleration framework is a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M.
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So it seems like the ones listed are just examples, but there could be other GPUs? This is totally totally vague in regards to which GPUs are supported exactly... if the 9400M does it, then the other Nvidia GPUs not listed likely would too? :confused:

Some people around here are such Adobe haters - talk about the HTML 5 drivel you've been fed and you all eat it up. Keeping Flash off the iPhone OS devices is all about protecting the precious app store, nothing more.
 
DivineEvil said:
Great news! I hope Flash becomes less power hungry by getting those APIs... I hate when the fans on my MBP 13" starts spinning like crazy by simply playing a flash game! While in Windows the same game is way less noisy and cooler...
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It's not going to help. A Flash game is not typically delivering H.264 video. In fact, the vast majority of Flash crap on websites doesn't use video, but sucks on Mac OS anyway. I can't claim to know whether Adobe, Apple, or both are to blame for it, but I do know that this particular API, as nice as it may be, isn't going to fix Flash.
 
TennisandMusic said:
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.
Click to expand...

I was hoping someone would preempt this expected nonsense, before it was claimed.

Lets make a few base things clear.
1) Flash > Video.
2) Hardware Acceleration was not available before 10.1 (even on Windows, or any other platform).

Now explanations, why your claim is nonsense:

1) Lack of HW acceleration does not explain the poor performance of Mac flash vis-a-vis the Windows side on any version of Flash before 10.1 (which was released a few months ago), because HW acceleration did not exist then.

2) Even after 10.1, lack of HW acceleration does not explain why non-video based Flash applications give such crappy performance on Mac vs. Windows (viz. games, and Flash ads... My fans start running on Flash ads on Macrumors on my Macbook when in OS X, but not in Windows on the same machine).

So, no, Apple had nothing to do with the crappy Flash performance. What they did do, however, was prevent Adobe from accessing a hardware solution to gloss over their problems (with good reasons too...giving devs direct HW access isn't the best idea) in their largest use case (Youtube videos) instead of actually fixing the issues with their player.
 
Good news for new 15" owners

Now the new MacBook Pro 15" models will switch over to dedicated graphics all the time while you browse those Flash heavy sites! :D

Nothing like draining the battery to see 4 animated Google Ads!!!

-Kevin
 
I don't care about Flash, but I do care about other apps...

I would love to see other apps such as VLC use hardware-accelerated video decoding.

This would also be great for those who use 9400m Mac Mini's as media centers.
 
Found this blog a few weeks back, while it's a little biased, it does provide some interesting insight into the problems of getting the best performance across all browsers.

The section on Core Animation support in the new Webkit builds and Flash 10.1 was very interesting.
 
madmaxmedia said:
I would love to see other apps such as VLC use hardware-accelerated video decoding.

This would also be great for those who use 9400m Mac Mini's as media centers.
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I think there was a thread around this on VLC forum, but it was about OpenCL not H.264 API. In due time the whole X.264 project might get to use OpenCL for total GPU acceleration, then any program that uses X.264 will benefit from it. Like Mplayer, VLC, etc.

But with this new API, they can quickly patch their apps to benefit from it.

About the lack of other Nvidia and ATI hardware, I suppose Apple doesn't care about the iMacs and Mac Pro's to get hardware acceleration at this point, since those machines are already fast enough to play 1080p movies at decent framerates. So it's not a priority.
 
on windows Flash is just as slow as on Mac OS. funny thing is that on my ancient P4 at work it seems to work OK with no fans running. on my newer dual core laptop the fans turn on anytime it goes on any flash site.

maybe Adobe wrote it to optimize for old CPU's?
 
whooleytoo said:
Your other points are very valid, but the above isn't necessarily true. Unless you're an Apple or Adobe engineer, you (or I) don't know the specifics of why Flash slower on the Mac. We're just guessing.
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Yes we are guessing. But in most cases it's developers fault. Flash on Linux also has terrible performance, and Linux is an open source system, so Adobe has access to everything when developing for Linux, still the performance is nowhere near as Windows.
 
iBug2 said:
I think there was a thread around this on VLC forum, but it was about OpenCL not H.264 API. In due time the whole X.264 project might get to use OpenCL for total GPU acceleration, then any program that uses X.264 will benefit from it. Like Mplayer, VLC, etc.

But with this new API, they can quickly patch their apps to benefit from it.

About the lack of other Nvidia and ATI hardware, I suppose Apple doesn't care about the iMacs and Mac Pro's to get hardware acceleration at this point, since those machines are already fast enough to play 1080p movies at decent framerates. So it's not a priority.
Click to expand...
Err, the new MacBook Pro's with the 330m can play 1080p perfectly fine and they are also more powerful than every C2D iMac CPU wise so I fail to see how this makes any sense...
 
starflyer said:
I'll give you that excuse for H.264 video, but what makes other the aspects of Flash run better on Windows?
Click to expand...
It comes and goes and it runs better on Mac now than it used to, but I've made tons of Flash trailers and stuff over the last 10 or so years and it was always painful to try them on Mac, especially if the Flash stage was large and had lots of layered animation with alpha transitions and such. It would play normally on a modest PC but on Mac you'd get an abysmal framerate combined with the fans sounding like vacuum cleaners. When I did stuff like fullscreen screensavers I had to keep it a lot more basic than I wanted to in order to make it play on Mac.

Anyway, this is an interesting turn of events. When Adobe announced that the new 10.1 player would have hardware acceleration on Windows and Linux but not on Mac due to not having access to the proper APIs, people said Adobe were just lazy and incompetent and that the tools had been there all along. Looks like Adobe weren't to blame after all.

Even without hardware acceleration the 10.1 player for Mac has been reported to be upwards of 80% more efficient, and that people can play fullscreen Hulu on Mac with no problems. With hardware acceleration on top of that, I think we can soon say goodbye to the days when watching YouTube videos fullscreen would turn an MBP into a stove crying for mercy.
 
Anuba said:
Looks like Adobe weren't to blame after all.

Even without hardware acceleration the 10.1 player for Mac has been reported to be upwards of 80% more efficient, and that people can play fullscreen Hulu on Mac with no problems. With hardware acceleration on top of that, I think we can soon say goodbye to the days when watching YouTube videos fullscreen would turn an MBP into a stove crying for mercy.
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Adobe seems to be the one to blame, because like many people said, other than video acceleration, which is coming to windows just now as well, flash always performed bad on a mac. And the only API missing on OS X was the hardware acceleration for H.264 one, which doesn't have anything to do with flash animations.

Again, Flash Linux performs terrible as well, where the developer has access to everything.
 
TennisandMusic said:
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.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah, I'm sure all the crashing is due to a lack of hardware acceleration. :rolleyes:
And nevermind that even before hardware acceleration on Windows, Flash still sucked on Mac...
 
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