Flash Video - Default Installation vs Adobe Flash Player?

[shoehornhands]

What's the difference between the default flash playback that comes with a fresh Mavericks / Yosemite installation and the Adobe flash player?

With a fresh Mavericks / Yosemite installation, flash video will play on my MacBook Air. The default flash option doesn't work very well with the firefox flashblock addon though.

If I go to the Adobe website and download and install the adobe flash player (over the default OS X flash option?), it tweaks the flash video / interface slightly and works much better with flashblock.

Does OS X come pre-installed with an Apple version of flash or something? If there are indeed two separate versions, is there a consensus as to which is better?

If somebody could clear this up for me I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

 

[johannnn]

Uuh does OS X come with pre-installed flash?
I thought what you get is H264 video, i.e. youtube-like services serves you the H264 version (similar to what iOS devices gets) instead of the flash version. H264 is nicer to the battery but has less features.

 

[shoehornhands]

Uuh does OS X come with pre-installed flash?
I thought what you get is H264 video, i.e. youtube-like services serves you the H264 version (similar to what iOS devices gets) instead of the flash version. H264 is nicer to the battery but has less features.

Ahh, maybe this is what's happening then. I just assumed it was flash (on Windows nothing will play until adobe flash player is installed). I wasn't aware there was an h.264 version.

That makes much more sense though. Flash always seemed pretty inefficient (on my older C2D MacBook Pro, flash video uses a ton of processing power and fans go crazy) so it makes sense they would use something else when possible.

Anyway, thanks for clearing that up for me.

 

[Altemose]

Some services offer h.264 and HTML 5 video when Adobe Flash Player is not installed or detected.