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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.

There is a difference between flash video and flash. I don't think anyone had a problem with flash video. It is just H.264 anyway... the same as HTML5.
 
"Flash is greater than Video"? I'm not sure you're helping to clarify things.:rolleyes:
People should write in English here, not use logic symbols because it often confounds things.

addicted44 meant to say that "Flash is more than Video," meaning that Flash is used for things like games (like FarmVille) in addition to video playback (YouTube, your typical porn site, etc.) in web browsers.

Plus, using logic symbols in place of basic English makes you look like a complete dork. It's like using airport codes for city names. Dorkville.
 
ADOBE IS DEAD.
I thought The Amazing Criswell (known from Ed Wood movies and the Jack Paar Show for his wildly inaccurate predictions) was the worst fortune teller ever, but with your track record of announcing the impending death of Microsoft/Adobe/any company that isn't Apple/ in all-caps in 90% of your posts, you have him beat.

Here's what would've been dead without Adobe: Apple, who survived the mid-90's only thanks to the loyal support of creative professionals who kept buying their computers when nobody else did. Had there been no Photoshop for Mac during those years, "Apple, Inc" would've been up for sale on Craig's List.
 
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?

When you run those from your computer, it does some of the work on the GPU. With GPU acceleration, it will play video the same way video is play when you play them off your hard drive. Gpu being more efficient.
 
People should write in English here, not use logic symbols when because it often confounds things.

addicted44 meant to say that "Flash is more than Video," meaning that Flash is used for things like games (like FarmVille) in addition to video playback (YouTube, your typical porn site, etc.) in web browsers.

And flash video is never a big deal if you ask me. Yes it runs the CPU's at 100% but it at least plays at regular framerates when it does.

Flash interactive websites which use animation on the other hand, run very sloppy and take away from the user experience.
 
Forget flash -- hardware accelerated h264 mkv playing! And here I just spent $120 on the WD TV Live to get this...

[And for all those who say mkv's play fine with plex, perian, vlc, etc, that's true for 720p and low-bitrate 1080p on my 2.66 ghz summer 09 MacBook Pro, but so far nothing can play high bitrate (> 20 mbps bursts) h264 material without stuttering a bit. The one exception is transcoding the mkv to mp4 that Quicktime will play with its built-in hardware acceleration. But even that is still a tad less smooth than my WDTV ... so perhaps hardware acceleration won't be the perfect panacea for high bitrate woes. But it will be a big improvement.]
 
You guys are making it sound like Windows users have had hardware decoding for a while and that's why flash was better on windows.

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but...

From the article



Apple opening up the API will allow adobe to make use of it for a feature that's in flash 10.1 which is still in beta and not released yet.

So unless you are using that beta,flash for windows doesn't have this feature either.

Since neither OS X or windows have this feature right now,I don't see how it could explain why flash runs better on windows right now.

I'm sure Adobe still had more flexibility to do things on Windows, long before 10.1.
 
Praise Apple, FINALLY!

This makes a lot of sense. This is what Mac customers have wanted for a long time. No more blaming Adobe for crap software. Now, give Adobe the same access to h.264 and see if it can put up or shut up. The Mac customers were losing out big time. Adobe wasn't losing, Apple wasn't losing, Apple Mac OS X customers were the only losers.

I had grown accustomed to booting into Windows 7 on my Mac so I could view Flash and HD videos via browser plug-ins on the Internet. I was truly enjoying the Windows 7 experience, and I had even grown so fond of Windows that I wasn't booting back into OS X unless I had to. Apple was losing OS X customers by denying them access to the apps/APIs (through Adobe/developers) they wanted on their Macs now and they could get them on their Macs by simply booting into Windows 7. The situation didn't make sense in the grand scheme of things.

This will make all Mac OS X customers happy with Apple and not lose out by booting in OS X instead of Windows 7 on their Macs. This is what Apple should have done over a year ago to give its customers a reason to not want to boot into Windows 7 in the first place.

It is a good day to be a Mac OS X user.

Now, Apple needs to truly solve the lack of a way to view Flash content on iPhone OS products. Not allow Flash to run or compete with Apple's own service offerings but to display Flash based content whether it be navigation or text content hidden to the user without Flash capabilities on their iPhone OS device.
 
When you run those from your computer, it does some of the work on the GPU. With GPU acceleration, it will play video the same way video is play when you play them off your hard drive. Gpu being more efficient.

Depends on the computer.

First of all, those are not codecs. Those are containers.

An H.264 video in flash is the same as an H.264 video in Quicktime, or MKV.

But the H.264 acceleration on Mac OS X only worked for Quicktime container so far, which was already in place since Mac OS 10.5.7.

What Apple is doing right now is opening up the acceleration to all containers.

And no, when you download a flash video to your harddrive and use VLC to run it, it still does not use hardware acceleration, because there is no hardware acceleration on Mac for .flv container, which is flash container.

So an H.264 video contained in an .flv will never use hardware acceleration on your Mac whether you play it on VLC or directly from flash plugin.

The reason it uses less CPU on VLC is simply because flash plugin uses unnecessary amounts of CPU even if it doesn't need it. It's just terribly coded bloatware. My Mac is capable of playing 1080p H.264 without any hardware acceleration with the CPU usage going between 50-100% (using multicore support of plex/mplayer to play them) where a flash 480p video will use 100% CPU when played within the plugin.

That same video won't use over 30% CPU when played through any other player software.
 
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.

It something that I used to wonder a long time ago when all the talk about hardware acceleration started, but now I understand it much better. It's a little complicated to explain, being that I'm no expert, but understand that your computer will run a lot cooler and use less power.
 
I've used it on Windows for years, and it runs perfectly.

Really? You should call Guinness and ask to be in their book.

There is no doubt that Flash sucks on OSX, but it's not stellar on Windows either. I have one of the most powerful computers you can buy, and I still get occasional stutters and hiccups. When you get down to the typical PC that most families have, Flash on Windows has many of the same problems that Mac users complain about. Not quite as severe, but still present.

There is plenty of blame to go around on this issue.
 
I'm sure Adobe still had more flexibility to do things on Windows, long before 10.1.

Again, whenever you think of flexibility think of the most flexible system out there, Linux. And flash performance on Linux is even worse than Mac.

So no it's not about flexibility.
 
Forget flash -- hardware accelerated h264 mkv playing! And here I just spent $120 on the WD TV Live to get this...

[And for all those who say mkv's play fine with plex, perian, vlc, etc, that's true for 720p and low-bitrate 1080p on my 2.66 ghz summer 09 MacBook Pro, but so far nothing can play high bitrate (> 20 mbps bursts) h264 material without stuttering a bit. The one exception is transcoding the mkv to mp4 that Quicktime will play with its built-in hardware acceleration. But even that is still a tad less smooth than my WDTV ... so perhaps hardware acceleration won't be the perfect panacea for high bitrate woes. But it will be a big improvement.]

I can play high bitrate (25-30 mbps) 1080p .mkv's through mplayer on my MBP 3.06 without any stuttering. CPU usage will be 150% max.
 
Back in the Flash MX/MX2004 days I was developing on a Windows PC and Flash ran great. For three months I worked on a dual 1GHz G4 and Flash was atrocious then.

Things picked up when I switched full-time to G5's - a dual core 2.0 was fine and my own quad 2.5GHZ had no issues, until Flash Player 9 which would run fine as a standalone player but within Safari dropped frames... on a vector animation. It was painful.

Now I'm using 10.1 beta on the G5 and it seems fine but the best thing that happened was ClickToFlash. While Flash never brought my G5 to its knees the way Intel Macs seem to suffer, it did make the room rather hot once it grabbed 120% of the 400% CPU available.

So, if it's all Apple's fault that Flash sucks, why has it sucked for the last 8 years, even at doing basic things like animating vectors (which it was designed for)? I think, if the blame is to be split, it's at least 70% Adobe's fault.
 
There is a difference between flash video and flash. I don't think anyone had a problem with flash video. It is just H.264 anyway... the same as HTML5.

Sure, but isn't all of flash, including the vector stuff, hardware accelerated on windows? I could be wrong, I am not positive on that one.

And flash video IS the issue with HTML 5. That's what it would be replacing. HTML 5 isn't going to be replacing all of the other myriad capabilities of Flash.
 
ADOBE IS DEAD.


So I guess Flash = Adobe.

And now Adobe is dead?

Disregarding Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Lightroom, Soundbooth, OnLocation...?

Yeah, I'd say your mantra is a little off. Though it is quite amazing to see how easily Apple fanaticism can shift ignorance into hating a professional creation company with no actual justification.
 
Back in the Flash MX/MX2004 days I was developing on a Windows PC and Flash ran great. For three months I worked on a dual 1GHz G4 and Flash was atrocious then.

Things picked up when I switched full-time to G5's - a dual core 2.0 was fine and my own quad 2.5GHZ had no issues, until Flash Player 9 which would run fine as a standalone player but within Safari dropped frames... on a vector animation. It was painful.

Now I'm using 10.1 beta on the G5 and it seems fine but the best thing that happened was ClickToFlash. While Flash never brought my G5 to its knees the way Intel Macs seem to suffer, it did make the room rather hot once it grabbed 120% of the 400% CPU available.

So, if it's all Apple's fault that Flash sucks, why has it sucked for the last 8 years, even at doing basic things like animating vectors (which it was designed for)? I think, if the blame is to be split, it's at least 70% Adobe's fault.

Because Apple doesn't support developers the way MS does. Not that it's all entirely Apple's fault at all but...if Flash runs great on one platform, and blows on another, and the company that makes it says they would love to improve it on the poor platform, but the owner won't give them the ability...well...what then?
 
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.
Well, there's a little more to it than Adobe being lazy, I think there's some political reluctance at play as well. Adobe and Apple were best pals for decades until Apple suddenly decided to turn against them, steal part of their business with Final Cut Studio, and then blocking Flash from their mobile devices.

Having said that – yes, Adobe have been lazy, too. It's what happens when the #1 company in a field acquires the #2 company so that there's more or less a de-facto monopoly. It's also possible that the Flash team (former Macromedia guys for the most part) have been dragging their feet in some sort of quiet protest against having become a side show instead of the stars.

But to their credit it seems they've now taken enough flak from all sides that they've decided to clean up their act, and if this new 10.1 player delivers on the promises (which it appears to be doing, judging by all the comments and reports), the Flash player will go from 75% nuisance / 25% useful to 25% / 75%.

On another note, I think this will mean a considerable drop in energy consumption around the globe. If you put together all the millions of people who leave their web browser open while they go out to lunch, which allows the umpteen Flash banners on that page to hog the CPU for an hour or so, and give them a new Flash player that hogs 86% less resources or whatever the hell it was, I think it's enough to shut down a dozen power plants globally. :D
 
There is no doubt that Flash sucks on OSX...

Really? I have a 10 month-old MBP that runs Flash perfectly. Sure, the fan is usually running wild while watching Flash video, but the fan is running wild all the time.
 
Sure, but isn't all of flash, including the vector stuff, hardware accelerated on windows? I could be wrong, I am not positive on that one.

And flash video IS the issue with HTML 5. That's what it would be replacing. HTML 5 isn't going to be replacing all of the other myriad capabilities of Flash.

Hardware accelerated in the terms of, yes windows hardware drivers have 2D acceleration which apply to anything you see on the screen, the same way Apple has 2D Quartz acceleration.

Windows wouldn't have any extra hardware acceleration for flash animations. Or I haven't seen any information about that on Adobe's flash website.
 
Also, hate or love Adobe, when ever I read someone saying, "Adobe is lazy," it makes that person look so bad. It truly makes it look like, "Daddy Steve said Adobe is lazy, and now we must repeat it over and over all over the internet." As soon as Steve said "Adobe is lazy," back in late January, I just new his big fans were going to repeat it over and over again weeks and months later. It's something that I notice a long time ago about Apple, release certain strategic quotes, and watch the really big Apple fans repeated over and over again. If it's a distortion of the truth, then it will soon become the truth in the eyes of the public.
 
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