This news has turned my really lemon'y day into lemonade. Indeed a small step but a step and initiated by 
...Whoa!
...Whoa!
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Apple Opens Door to Hardware-Accelerated Decoding of H.264 Video in Flash
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What REALLY confuses me is that this is supported in the 9400M but not the 9600M GT. Why would apple exclude the discrete video card in the older unibodies while using their older integrated video cards and then supporting BOTH of the newer NVIDIA cards?
Wrong. Flash performance on OS X is an Adobe problem. VLC, and any number of 3rd party video players use way less CPU power on OS X to play back H.264 then Flash, without hardware acceleration. And h.264 is only a small part of the Flash problem. Flash is also not h.264 accelerated on Windows either, until 10.1, currently in beta form.
The h.264 acceleration is only part of the whole picture anyhow. Adobe was free to use OpenCL, an open standard for GPU acceleration that works on even more cards, and they didn't. Adobe was free to use various Quicktime calls to accelerate Flash, and they didn't. Adobe was free to use any number of new APIs Apple has added to OS X over many versions, and they haven't. Hell, Photoshop and their other creative products were still using Classic Mac OS era APIs until CS5.
Way off.
The most commonly used is netshare, which pegs Mac OS worldwide at 5.33%, Windows at 91.58% and Linux at 1.03%. This also jives more or less with published sales numbers.
I know what Apple is doing...
The only reason Apple is "letting" Adobe have access to this now is to prove a point. For years Apple has called Adobe lazy, and rightfully so. The point that Apple is going to prove by opening this now is to show that Adobe, despite all the whining about access to GPU acceleration, will take their sweet time in making this work, and probably will never get around to it at all, thus proving Steve Jobs right...Adobe IS lazy.
Prove me wrong Adobe, please.
The only reason Apple is "letting" Adobe have access to this now is to prove a point. For years Apple has called Adobe lazy, and rightfully so. The point that Apple is going to prove by opening this now is to show that Adobe, despite all the whining about access to GPU acceleration, will take their sweet time in making this work, and probably will never get around to it at all, thus proving Steve Jobs right...Adobe IS lazy.
Prove me wrong Adobe, please.
No, it's just your common sense that's dead.
Flash is the -only- browser-independent multi-platform solution that actually works.
Saying it sucks just because it is widely abused to show ad banners is just stupid. You could also say that you hate web browsers for the same reason. Or your computer, because it runs the browser that connects to the Internet to download those ads that were animated in Flash.
Flash made good on Java's broken promises.
A Flash application looks and behaves the same in any browser on any platform.
Do you honestly believe that this bundle of dissociated technologies around a PAGE DESCRIPTION language, HTML5, will actually look and behave the same in all web browsers? Dream on.
Designers will have to learn a bunch of languages to produce something around HTML5, and there are NO design tools available for that new Tower of Babel. There are not even browsers that actually fully support all that stuff.
Flash has been around for years, and it is known to actually work. Generations of web designers know and use it on a daily basis. And it is owned by the company that owns the market for design tools.
In the executive summary: Flash and Adobe are not going anywhere.
But I'm still wondering why all you Apple fanboys run around screaming that Flash sucks on your precious little designer computers.
I've owned more than a dozen Macs in the last five years, from 700 MHz PowerPC G4s to Quad Core iMacs and Mac Pros. Flash ran perfectly well on all of those Macs and never caused a single crash.
Sure, it performed not extraordinarily fast on PowerPC Macs, but then again, NOTHING performed well on those slow PowerPC machines. Apple spent a lot of marketing dollars on brainwashing the customers into believing that the PowerPC CPU was the best thing since sliced bread while at the same time they were preparing the switch to Intel processors behind closed curtains.
Anyway. I really don't know or understand where all that artificial hatred against Flash comes from. But Apple fanboys are known to hate everything with a passion that is not carrying a fruit logo. Unless, of course, Apple steals the idea or buys the company that invented the product. Then, all of a sudden, everything is "awesome, amazing, beautiful, huge" again.
OpenCL - which runs on a fraction of the fraction of Apple OSX systems that run 10.6?
Apple has been ignoring cards with hardware video acceleration for years, while Windows has been exposing them. Even today, Apple's H.264 runs on a tiny fraction of the video systems that Apple's shipped in the last five years. Windows does video acceleration on almost all of the same cards - even on an Apple if you dual-boot.
There is also the historical aspects as well. Back when first Flash players were written by Macromedia, Mac marketshare was much smaller. They may have developed an unoptimized player with whatever efforts they thought they could afford based on the number of OSX users at the time. If the foundation was not very good, it is very difficult for any company to write software from scratch especially if it is good enough. Indeed, Flash runs well enough on my 2006 iMac CoreDuo. It runs Hulu streams without stuttering and that type of a Flash site is what matters for most people. I don't know why there is so much outrage against Flash performance anyways. Maybe, it is because I don't play online Flash games.
I usually dislike Flash sites, because most of them are not well designed, not because of any technical issues. Let's take many car company websites. They take too long to load, force me to go through many layers of hierarchy to get to the information I need, use pop-up windows instead of keeping everything in the same browser tab, place distracting pieces of info boxes flickering around etc. Out of regular web surfing habit, I hit the back button of my browser to get back to the previous "page", but that takes me to a completely different place, not the previous "page" of the Flash presentation. Then I have to go forward, wait for Flash to load, navigate back to the page that had the information from scratch once again. The whole experience sucks, but not because of the performance of the Flash player. I am pretty sure the designer makes it look really nice when he shows the website to the boss, while randomly navigating different parts of the site. I doubt anybody over there tries to imagine how a real prospective customer would actually use their website.
Really? That must explain then why Adobe has a so much bigger software portfolio than Apple - and that on more platforms than Apple.
I think this is just another stupid Steve Jobs marketing statement being parroted everywhere.
We all might not like the fact that Adobe's products are expensive, but strangely enough, the same people that hate Adobe for that still buy expensive, over-priced Apple products.
You might not like to pay the upgrade prices for small evolutionary improvements, but at the same time, people are paying for a new version of iLife, iWork and OS X every 18 months. And Apple's software also only has small evolutionary improvements and no quantum leaps.
What were the great new features of Snow Leopard again? Dropping PowerPC support? Oh. That's actually LOSING a feature. Oh, they increased the performance. Wow. At least they broke almost every application ever written for OS X with Snow Leopard - including most of their own software.
Apple obviously was too lazy to run its software through some serious QA testing.
We have a saying in Germany: "Wer im Glashaus sitzt, sollte nicht mit Steinen werfen." (Who sits in a glass house shouldn't throw stones.)
But I keep forgetting that Apple is more like a sect than a company. Facts are not welcome here.
Hating flash doesn't have anything to do with being an Apple fanboy.
I hate flash because it messes up the internet experience. I hate websites done with flash. You spend 10 times more time to do the exact same thing you'd do on a regular HTML site because you need to watch all those small animations on every single click.
I'd also hate HTML5 if they used it to put the exact kind of ******** into websites.
I'd be celebrating if no website looked any more fancier than amazon.com. Web is supposed to be about efficiency. Getting things done. At least when flash first emerged every website had a flash and html version, so people who didn't like flash could use the html version. Now that everyone has flash installed default, lazy webdesigners stopped making html versions so you have to sit through the sloppy experience whether you like it or not.
Yeah, and Final Cut Pro, still uses the same "Classic Mac OS era APIs...."
What's your point?
Apple first said (in 2006) that there will be 64bit Carbon APIs, so Adobe, and most of the Apple ProApps team were thinking they wouldn't have to do a major rewrite.
Then in 2007 Apple changed its mind, and declared that everything had to be rewritten in Cocoa.
So now all the ignorant fanboys bitch and moan about Adobe, when even Apple itself is lagging behind Adobe in rewriting a major app.
Sure it has. You can GPU-accelerate any video codec through Open CL. It's not an easy job to do though. Nobody can blame Adobe for not incorporating Open CL into any of their Mac Products yet. Open CL has been around for a year only. It took more than 2 years for developers to write something useful with CUDA. It'll take the same amount for Open CL.
You are only saying Apple is lazy as well, which I wouldn't object. Doesn't change the fact that Adobe had 15 years to actually fix flash and they didn't. That's what happens when you have monopoly.
I'm surprised Apple admits that is was their stupidity all along that made flash suck.
Apple and Apple fanboys = owned.
Apple and Apple fanboys = owned.
You don't really understand do you?
H.264 is only a very very very very small part of flash. When people complain about flash, they are not only complaining about high CPU usage when they are playing youtube videos. That's actually the least of most people's concerns.
And we already knew that it was Apple who didn't have an API for H.264 GPU acceleration. This is not news to anyone who is a least bit into the subject.
I'll give you that but it's a huge waste to use shaders instead of the dedicated UVD/PureVideo hardware.
Ok, you hate Apple, Fine.
It still doesn't change the FACT that Adobe Products are not optimized to run as best they could. Since Adobe is the only big dog on the block, they sit back and are lazy...refer back to the whole IE6 beat Netscape days for a great example of lazy on MS's part. Adobe is no different today. 90% of their users will agree. This is not about Apple vs Adobe. This is Adobe vs the users.
Until there is true competition for Adobe, you me and the rest will be stuck with their crap products. Thank God for Final Cut...as Adobe's lame attempt at video editing software is just that... lame. Sure, some of Adobe's products can do great things, but how much better could they be if optimized?
Again, based on FACT of everyday use, Adobe is a lazy developer. The Windows development world sure has rubbed off on them...
Save your pointless and false Apple vs Adobe app comparisons to prove you hate Apple, that is not the point here. Nice try though troll.
That's true. But if people learn how to use Open CL for this job, then they won't have to wait for the GPU manufacturers to incorporate new hardware for newer codecs. For example when H.265 emerges some day, the GPU you have today won't have the Nvidia PureVideo hardware to decode that. But stream processors through CUDA/Open CL can do it even with the old GPU.
So going through Open CL would enable old GPU's to accelerate the newest codecs.
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.
HTML5 vs Flash comparison
Here you go, this might help settle some arguments, or add oil to the fire. XD
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/html5-vs-flash-comparison-finds-a-few-surprises-settles-few-de/
This is essentially a comparison of html5, js, and flash that I don't really understand, but the results appear to vary based on the browser, os, and time of day
Here you go, this might help settle some arguments, or add oil to the fire. XD
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/html5-vs-flash-comparison-finds-a-few-surprises-settles-few-de/
This is essentially a comparison of html5, js, and flash that I don't really understand, but the results appear to vary based on the browser, os, and time of day
You haven;t kept up with windows drivers have you. Graphics driver have ran in usermode since vista. They are completely isolated from the kernel and can be stopped and restarted at anytime. Apple should have video drivers outside the kernel by now.
