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Apple Opens Door to Hardware-Accelerated Decoding of H.264 Video in Flash
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Xian Zhu Xuande
macrumors 6502a
Utter nonsense. Adobe has all the programming talent and resources they need to make Flash on Mac every bit as good as they want it to. They don't need to have an Apple engineer holding their hand. Flash on Mac sucks because they haven't put the energy into developing it properly; or redeveloping it as the case may be.
That said, it was inherited from Macromedia.
I think Apple stole more business from Avid, not Premiere, since Premiere wasn't the #1 product on video editing market to begin with. If Apple on the other hand came up with their image editing app, that would be an immediate attack on Adobe.
About Apple and Adobe being best pals until then, I think Adobe gained significant windows marketshare on photoshop long before Apple released FCP. So before FCP was out, Adobe's dependance on Apple was not as high as before.
gnasher729
Suspended
Flash sucks because of Adobe. Adobe manages to use 100% of a CPU even when displaying tiny frames of static images. The only difference will be that Adobe will display 1000 frames per second of unchanging images using 100% of the CPU instead of 100 frames per second.
Video was never the issue.
Flash websites run very sloppy on macs.
Video uses CPU a lot, but plays at the required framerates at least, so you are not losing anything from the experience other than some fan noise.
But browsing flash websites is slow on Macs. Navigating is laggy.
That's the bigger issue since it actually effects your experience on those websites.
Edit: Well video is not a problem at home at least. But it uses a lot of battery on the road for sure, so in that case, video is also a big problem right now.
This is great but as said why not 8600M GT and 9600M GT? Both of them have the required hardware.
MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
The latter is the disappointing part. Certainly other GPUs that Apple has used could have at least some value in hardware acceleration of video. My 8600M GT in a mere 1.5 year old MBP has no support and it's hardly a crappy GPU. Apple really needs to support their video drivers for longer than a year....sheesh. If NVidia were maintaining the drivers, I don't think this would be an issue.
I also wonder if the GPU in the AppleTV could be utilized (with a driver update) to a little better than it does now with somewhat higher bit-rates. Given Apple only expects it to run Apple HD content (which runs fine), I expect they couldn't care less and it's probably why they do not offer a hardware update after all this time. I mean they can hardly switch to 1080P or even higher-rate 720P without leaving the current deployed units in the dust. While they obviously have NO moral problem doing that with Macs, I don't think they have enough of a turn-over rate to get away with it with the Apple TV. Besides, they appear to have a distribution problem (i.e. how many HD movies are actually for sale on iTunes? VERY FEW. And those are also the only ones that you can rent from a regular Mac). This whole question of Blu-Ray versus HD iTunes is moot just on the basis of available titles. I WISH I could buy some of the titles they have available to RENT for Apple TV. Instead, I'm forced to either re-encode Blu-Ray or download movies off the Internet and re-encode to see things like The Matrix in HD (unless I want to rent it over and over again at $4 a pop).
Again, I'm no expert, so I can only explain things in non technical form. From what I've read, lets say you play a typical video from your computer, lets say that to show each frame requires 5 steps. On flash all of those steps have to go through the CPU, but from your hard drive some of most of those steps go to the GPU. (I'm assuming older video formats, like mpg are all GPU accelerated) GPU acceleration basically plays the video in a similar manner than video being played off your computer, with some of the steps going to the GPU, and that's why a GPU accelerated 720p youtube video only uses like 10 to 13% CPU power on Windows, because it's playing it in a similar manner, or just like it would play off your harddrive.
All Apple video drivers are written by Nvidia and ATI. Not by Apple. Nvidia's driver code is 100% closed. So no other company than Nvidia can write drivers for their products, except by reverse engineering on Linux, which don't run that well.
ATI's driver code is half closed half open.
But I think the reason why Nvidia can't port VDPAU to OS X is due to Apple not supplying them with the required API's.
Surely GPU accelerated video uses much less CPU.
But even two different softwares, both not using GPU acceleration, can use different amounts of CPU.
Like flash plugin and VLC/mplayer.
Flash plugin uses more than twice as much CPU for the same video than VLC uses. And both of them don't use any GPU acceleration for that particular video.
But it is more than just video
A lot of flash content, not just video, is a performance black hole on my macs. This is a good development, but it is not flash video threads that are crashing my browsers, it is the other crappy SWFs. I have noflash installed on all my machines, so I can control whether I risk playing flash content and I really look forward to the new version of safari that will reduce one thread taking down the rest. I hope Adobe programmers work on improving flash performance on the mac overall, but somehow I doubt they will.
A lot of flash content, not just video, is a performance black hole on my macs. This is a good development, but it is not flash video threads that are crashing my browsers, it is the other crappy SWFs. I have noflash installed on all my machines, so I can control whether I risk playing flash content and I really look forward to the new version of safari that will reduce one thread taking down the rest. I hope Adobe programmers work on improving flash performance on the mac overall, but somehow I doubt they will.
VLC 1.1 is able to use GPU acceleration if you are using Windows or Linux.
http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_DxVA2
Anuba
macrumors 68040
That's not really my experience...
On my MBP 17" (also 10 months old, bought it after the 2.8/3.0 GHz models had been announced last June), I've only found three ways to make the fans step up from the regular, barely audible RPM, to one of the whooshier levels (I think there are two, or maybe it's dynamic... dunno).
1. Auto-mount my SMB NAS drive when OS X boots up. This sends the computer into a crazy frenzy with a billion trillion percent CPU usage that lasts for about 5 minutes. If I mount the shares manually (or automount them in Windows), no problem.
2. Run Windows 7 in Boot Camp, fire up Photoshop CS4 and draw selections around stuff. For some wildly bizarre reason known only to Adobe, this menial task is heavier than playing a first person shooter at full blast.
3. Play Flash videos fullscreen. As long as I avoid going fullscreen the fans generally remain quiet, unless I have the discrete GPU activated, but when I go fullscreen the fan noise is unbearable. It's not that loud, but since I know the sound means the machine is seriously hot, it still hurts.
But we are talking about Mac here.
Mplayer has been using video acceleration on Windows for a year now for example.
I don't know if its Apple being lazy or greedy but there are many Nvidia chipsets that would support h.264 acceleration with "up-to-date" drivers.
All Nvidia GPU's starting with 8xxx series with couple exceptions support H.264 acceleration through VDPAU on Linux and Directx Video Acceleration on Windows. So yes, the capability is in the GPU.
And Apple needs to write the required API's to get the support to OS X.
So in this case it's about Apple being lazy that we still don't have GPU acceleration with the various Nvidia Hardware. But that's not because Apple writes the drivers, it's because Apple has to supply the API to Nvidia, for them to incorporate it to their drivers themselves.
Apple Haters
I don't understand these Apple Haters! What part of Adobe Flash is proprietary don't yal understand? Apple is supporting open platforms: CSS, Java Script, H.264, HTML5,etc. Flash is 90's technology! Sure it's served it's purpose and will still have it's place in technology for sometime, but it's time we move on! Apple has done this once b4 when the first iMac did not come with a floppy disk drive. They rattled the tech community but "where is floppy now?😉"
TennisandMusic said:
I don't understand these Apple Haters! What part of Adobe Flash is proprietary don't yal understand? Apple is supporting open platforms: CSS, Java Script, H.264, HTML5,etc. Flash is 90's technology! Sure it's served it's purpose and will still have it's place in technology for sometime, but it's time we move on! Apple has done this once b4 when the first iMac did not come with a floppy disk drive. They rattled the tech community but "where is floppy now?😉"
Again I'm no expert on the subject, but flash from what I see is more like a virtual machine, in order to work in all platforms, so it works differently than video player installed on your computer. The bottom line is that those video on VLC are not doing all the work on the CPU, while flash does, and a more meaningful comparison would be the same video being played on GPU accelerated flash and VLC. Also consider that any GPU made in the last 5 years probably has playback support for all the older video formats. That's just a logical assumption from my part.
Here's what I need some clarification on. I have the unibody Macbook Pro with both the 9400 and 9600 in it. I leave it set on the 9600 all the time. In this situation, would the hardware acceleration still take advantage of the 9400 which is just sitting there doing nothing at all right now?
I remember hearing some time ago that this may be possible in the future and if this is what's going to happen that would be just awesome.
I remember hearing some time ago that this may be possible in the future and if this is what's going to happen that would be just awesome.
Maybe they are lazy. They sure charge a butt load for there software!! Plus Adobe should thank Apple. The Macintosh is what put Adobe on the map!
On Macbooks with double GPU, even if you are using 9600GT, the system is still capable of using 9400M for H.264 acceleration. So you don't need to relog every time. So no need to worry.