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

[Headrush69]

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.

Just because you can hide the problems using better hardware features doesn't mean it didn't suck.

VLC or QuickLook on OS X doesn't use hardware acceleration either yet playing the same video on it uses less CPU than the same video enclosed in a flash container in safari or firefox, why?

P.S. Just double checked with Flash version 10,1,51,45 installed.

 

[offwidafairies]

this is awesome news - hopefully it will work on the iphone too!
a truce???

 

[cult hero]

This is my biggest concern as well. I mean it's not like the "older" notebook GPU's are that much slower than the latest notebook GPU's.

Annoying, but typical Apple. Apple artificially pushes the upgrade train and has since I've been using OS X. At this point I just expect it.

 

[Anuba]

Why does this tosh keep spouting out of your mouth? The 10.1 beta addresses many of the historic issues Flash has had on OSX, with no hardware acceleration. So why has Flash been so bad on OSX for years? It does not take an Adobe or Apple software engineer to work this out.

Why is Flash on Linux so bad? Adobe even has access to the source, yet it isn't even on par with Flash on Windows.

Well, to be honest a lot of things suck for Linux. Software companies support it with the same amount of enthusiasm that republicans hand out social security checks. "Hey everyone, who wants to do the Linux version? Any volunteers? Anyone? Anyone...?"

I used to work at a software company and we'd get these long emails from some users about the monumental importance of developing Linux versions of our products. They made it sound like our Mac and Windows versions were peanuts compared to this vast, unexplored ocean of business opportunities available in the Linux world. The problem is, we got about 2-3 such emails per year. If that was any indication of the "opportunity" it constituted, I think the investment vs. payoff ratio would've been something like 1,000 to 1.

 

[macUser2007]

... So why has Flash been so bad on OSX for years? It does not take an Adobe or Apple software engineer to work this out.

Why is Flash on Linux so bad? Adobe even has access to the source, yet it isn't even on par with Flash on Windows.

Uhm, so you are saying that OS X is as marginal as Linux...?

But, seriously, HTML5 sucks on Linux, too. Chrome running HTML5 shows worse performance than Uzbl running Flash. And Chrome running Flash is worse than Uzbl running Flash.

 

[iBug2]

Annoying, but typical Apple. Apple artificially pushes the upgrade train and has since I've been using OS X. At this point I just expect it.

Apple pushes the upgrade train? Do you know how often people replace the GPU's on their PC's? Much more often than we replace our macs.

Gaming industry pushes the upgrade train on the PC side constantly. New games emerge and they run slow on 6 month old GPU > you buy new GPU.

And then after another 6 months you do that again.

 

[Nuvi]

Is there any possibility not to turn every discussion into battle about Apple vs. Adobe? This is about API's for all the third party apps to support hardware h.264 decoding. What we now really need is new drivers that actually support hardware accelerated h.264 decoding on the 8xxx and higher chipsets.

 

[smetvid]

Why is it that Flash sucks just because it doesn't work as well under OSX compared to Windows but yet Safari and Quicktime don't suck because they do not work as well under Windows as they do under OSX? Cross platform development is hard and both OS's are very different. Sometimes one particular piece of software may work better on one OS then the other. Blender is a good example. It is cross platform and open source but yet it always performs different on different platforms. It has been known to perform much better under Linux. Is the Blender development team lazy? Is Apple lazy because quicktime and Safari do not work as well under Windows. Heck Windows users still cannot get decent multicore quicktime playback for HD video such as Photojpeg but yet we don't go around saying that Quicktime sucks and it should die.

 

[Mad Mac]

I agree with all except QuicktimeX does not choke on video VLC can play. On the contrary QuicktimeX uses multiple cores where VLC can't. So I can't play certain videos on VLC which play perfectly fine on QuicktimeX.

Correct. But until today, Apple did not allow other programs to access the acceleration that QTX has. Better late than never I suppose. But I'm SOL since I don't have the latest supported hardware.

Then again, you don't really need hardware acceleration on any of the Macs sold in last 2 years since all of them are perfectly capable of playing 1080p movies at 30fps through CPU only. So other than battery life on the road, you don't lose much.

Any Core2Duo CPU is capable of playing 1080p through CPU only.

Not true. Even my '08 Mac Pro stutters with high bitrate BD rips. The lowly (and very inexpensive) netbooks and nettops with the Nvidia Ion chip will chew through 1080 content without sweating thanks to GPU acceleration. The CPU is simply not a good choice for video decoding.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Please calm down!

This is good news. It will be a long time before we'll see online video go all-native. (Too much tied into copy protection, interactivity, overlays, etc..)

The bad news;

"available on Mac OS X 10.6.3 and later with Mac models equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M."

New computers and OS only....

New computers? A "Late 2008" MBP has a 9400M. And most up to four years old Intel-based Macs support SL. H.264 is mostly used for HD-content, whatever it is. I do not think it makes sense to support older hardware, which is not able to drive HD-displays.

 

[iBug2]

Not true. Even my '08 Mac Pro stutters with high bitrate BD rips. The lowly (and very inexpensive) netbooks and nettops with the Nvidia Ion chip will chew through 1080 content without sweating thanks to GPU acceleration. The CPU is simply not a good choice for video decoding.

Then you are using the wrong software. I have 08 Mac Pro, I play 30mpbs untouched bluray rips with no stuttering using Mplayer. But you need the multithreaded version of Mplayer, otherwise it'll only use single core, which won't be enough.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

The best news I've heard in ages. It's limited to the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M though.

It's a foundation. You can build upon it.

 

[Nuvi]

New computers? A "Late 2008" MBP has a 9400M. And most up to four years old Intel-based Macs support SL. H.264 is mostly used for HD-content, whatever it is. I do not think it makes sense to support older hardware, which is not able to drive HD-displays.

Even early 2008 17" MBP's had build to order HD-display option and 8600M GT chipset which by hardware is capable of hardware accelerated h.264 encoding but drivers are not supporting it.

 

[iBug2]

Correct. But until today, Apple did not allow other programs to access the acceleration that QTX has. Better late than never I suppose. But I'm SOL since I don't have the latest supported hardware.

Again not true. QuicktimeX doesn't access any GPU acceleration on my MacPro 08. It uses purely CPU. The only difference is it supports multithreads.

The players which support multithreading for H.264 on OS X are

Mplayer compiled with ffmpeg-mt
Plex
QuicktimeX

 

[Anuba]

Too bad Adobe has waited until now to move in that direction and you know why? Now that a big time company is just flat out rejecting them, they have to make a case for their technology rather than just sit on their collective rears and suck up the stagnation that comes from unchallenged ubiquity.

The "Apple set Adobe straight" story is good narrative, sure, but it doesn't really fit the timeline. The Flash player overhaul has been in the works for years and started long before Apple declared war on them. And that war started fairly recently. While its roots date back to the release of the original (and Flash-free) iPhone, for a long time the official line was that Adobe and Apple were working together to bring Flash to the iPhone somehow, and back then Apple's attitude wasn't like it is now.

Whatever Adobe says, Flash is not an 'open' platform, and probably never will be. It is closed source and maintained by one company, which is not good for the end user no matter how much of the current Internet depends on it.

The key word here is "probably". I have a feeling that Adobe will keep Flash closed as long as they have the upper hand, but as soon as they start to feel seriously threatened I think they'll open it up, like they did with PDF (now an open standard). They have nothing to lose, really, the darn player has always been free anyway. It exists only to drive sales of Flash Professional which is an excellent environment to work in, with or without the Flash player as target. You can apparently export to HTML5 Canvas in Flash CS5, which I guess makes Flash the only decent professional tool for producing Canvas stuff...

So yeah, about this "Adobe is dead" stuff... sounds a bit "Adobe = Flash" to me. Flash is just one small part of their business. Even if Flash would die tomorrow they'll still be selling millions of copies of Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, InDesign... Adobe will die when Microsoft dies, i.e. not in our lifetime.

 

[iBug2]

Even early 2008 17" MBP's had build to order HD-display option and 8600M GT chipset which by hardware is capable of hardware accelerated h.264 encoding but drivers are not supporting it.

But the CPU on the 08 MBP is enough to play it, so you don't need the acceleration if all you want is to actually view the content.

 

[Mad Mac]

New computers? A "Late 2008" MBP has a 9400M. And most up to four years old Intel-based Macs support SL. H.264 is mostly used for HD-content, whatever it is. I do not think it makes sense to support older hardware, which is not able to drive HD-displays.

Early '08 MBP has 8600M GT and is not supported.

Then you are using the wrong software. I have 08 Mac Pro, I play 30mpbs untouched bluray rips with no stuttering using Mplayer. But you need the multithreaded version of Mplayer, otherwise it'll only use single core, which won't be enough.

I'm using VLC. Quicktime (Leopard) won't even play. Can Mplayer do BD on a C2D? Are we talking 100% (or close to it) CPU utilization?

 

[iigsie]

Uhm, so you are saying that OS X is as marginal as Linux...?

No certainly not. Are you sugegsting that OSX is as dominant as Windows....?

The reason Flash sucks on a Mac is mainly down to Adobe. Installed userbase of the OS probably has an impact on man hours they put into development, but at the end of the day Adobe controls it's closed platform and is subsequently responsible for it's performance on each of the OS's it choses to develop the Flash player plugin for.

 

[iBug2]

Early '08 MBP has 8600M GT and is not supported.

I'm using VLC. Quicktime (Leopard) won't even play. Can Mplayer do BD on a C2D? Are we talking 100% (or close to it) CPU utilization?

VLC on mac does not support multithreading. It'll use a single core, which isn't enough to play even a 10mbps h.264, let alone 30mbps. So VLC will stutter in scenes with a lot of motion.

Mplayer playing an untouched 1080p bluray will use around 150% when maxed out in certain scenes on my Mac Pro 08.

My MacBook Pro 3.06 can play untouched blurays perfectly fine with Mplayer as well.

Plex does around the same as Mplayer, it also uses multiple cores and can play everything perfectly fine. I just don't like the GUI on plex so I use mplayer.

 

[Nuvi]

But the CPU on the 08 MBP is enough to play it, so you don't need the acceleration if all you want is to actually view the content.

When batch encoding with Compressor you can't simultaneously view already encoded high res h.264 clips but with acceleration there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible. Ability to encode and view at the same time would be great...

 

[iBug2]

When batch encoding with Compressor you can't simultaneously view already encoded high res h.264 clips but with acceleration there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible. Ability to encode and view at the same time would be great...

Yes that's true of course.

 

[Mad Mac]

VLC on mac does not support multithreading. It'll use a single core, which isn't enough to play even a 10mbps h.264, let alone 30mbps. So VLC will stutter in scenes with a lot of motion.

Mplayer playing an untouched 1080p bluray will use around 150% when maxed out in certain scenes on my Mac Pro 08.

My MacBook Pro 3.06 can play untouched blurays perfectly fine with Mplayer as well.

Plex does around the same as Mplayer, it also uses multiple cores and can play everything perfectly fine. I just don't like the GUI on plex so I use mplayer.

I'll give Mplayer a try. My MBP is only a 2.4GHz C2D so hopefully it doesn't turn into an oven. Plex is nice but the audio on it is extremely low for some reason so it's unusable.

Back to topic, I really hope Apple will change their mind and offer support for the older Nvidia cards that support h.264 acceleration. All these other solutions aren't very elegant.

 

[doctoree]

I don't understand why Apple didn't use Open CL to implement this into the OS. With Open CL, automatically all GPUs (that support OpenCL) would've been able to accelerate video and not just this handfull...

 

[iBug2]

No certainly not. Are you sugegsting that OSX is as dominant as Windows....?

With your statement above you've actually proved your other statement wrong. The reason Flash sucks on a Mac is purely down to Adobe. While the OSX userbase isn't as small as the Linux userbase, it's still small compared to the amount of PC's running Windows. And this is where they spend their efforts.

It's like this

Windows 90%
OS X 9%
Linux 1%
So it's around 10x on each jump.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

New computers? A "Late 2008" MBP has a 9400M. And most up to four years old Intel-based Macs support SL. H.264 is mostly used for HD-content, whatever it is. I do not think it makes sense to support older hardware, which is not able to drive HD-displays.

And I think you're utterly clueless. My MBP *IS* a "Late 2008" MBP if I define "late" as in purchased in October (10 out of 12 months) as "late". It has an 8600M GT in it and that is 100% capable of hardware acceleration for H264. It drives my 24" LG monitor at 1920x1440 quite well (above HD) thank you very much so you truly sound like you are talking at your rear orifice when you imply that Macbook Pros that are less than 2 years old can't handle hardware acceleration or HD video. PURE NONSENSE. My MBP is barely over 1.5 years old and its 8600M GT is almost as fast as the current MBP GPU if you're talking 3D frame rates. This Apple "fanboy" stuff is really getting taken to extremes when you have people trying to half-azz defend Apple not supporting hardware acceleration on machines that aren't even two years old yet. They should have HAD hardware acceleration when they were first released! It is Apple that is lazy and behind the times. With over $40 BILLION in petty cash, they could afford to hire some people to keep their OS drivers up-to-date. I'm tired of hearing excuses why OSX releases are going to be delayed by iPhone development as if Apple cannot afford to hire more programmers (greedy SOBS that they are) or why the OS doesn't have features that Windows had 5 years ago (state of the art OS that it supposedly is et al).