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How to make Flash SCREAM

macduke

macduke

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jun 27, 2007
13,674
21,104
I read this blog post by John Nack of Adobe and found it interesting. This is what I did to make Flash on my two year old Macbook Pro fly:

1.) Download the Flash uninstaller from this site: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

2.) Download Flash 10.1 Beta 2 from this site: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

3.) Close all browsers

4.) Run the Flash uninstaller

5.) Run the Flash 10.1 Beta 2 installer

6.) Relaunch browsers

I loaded up this Youtube video, The Dark Knight trailer and selected 1080p HD. Not once before have I ever been able to watch 1080p Youtube videos without some sort of frame stuttering, high CPU usage and fans kicking into high gear. This time, however, the frames did not lag and smcFanControl only registered an increase in the fan speed from 2000 to 2200 RPM. Nice. However, the CPU usage still seems a bit on the high side, around 50%, but at least it was still leaving a whole other core for the system to use while Flash is churning away. Though it is still full screen 1080p video, so it needs to use some horsepower.

For reference, I have an early 2008 MBP 2.4ghz C2D with 4gb ram and a 256mb nVidia GeForce 8600 GT.

Why I posted this in the iPad forum? Well, for some it may be obvious. Steve Jobs didn't want Flash in the iPad for performance reasons. I've used that as a reason several times in these forums for why I don't really care if the iPad has Flash. It was so slow and made my system suck a whole lot more in general. This news is a positive sign. Adobe is clearly working on getting Flash up to speed on Apple platforms. So for all you Flash lovers, hold onto the hope. For me it's not a huge deal, but it would be nice if Flash was finally optimized for us. HTML5 has lots of advantages, and most websites shouldn't be built entirely in Flash anymore. But having legacy support would be nice if we didn't have to suffer the performance hit. And obviously, it is even more important to get the performance right on these smaller devices with limited power, both in terms of processing and battery.

Sorry if these directions about Flash 10.1 Beta 2 have been posted elsewhere, but I looked through all the recent iPad threads and didn't see it mentioned. Hopefully this will help those suffering from poor Flash performance. Note that this is beta pre-release software, but it seems to be pretty solid so far and I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't finalized before too long.
 
I've got a similarly-specced MBP and followed your instructions. Still had problems with cooked CPU and fans going full blast (around 4000rpm).

However, as a comparison I ran an HD video through VLC and it was whacking the hardware as well...

Now imagine playing this on an iPad with no fans. It would be glowing red hot!
 
colmaclean said:
I've got a similarly-specced MBP and followed your instructions. Still had problems with cooked CPU and fans going full blast (around 4000rpm).
Click to expand...

HA. I had my MBP running about 7000 attemping to watch an episode of Caprica last week. They were so loud I couldn't even watch it.

The next day, they never went over 2500 watching the same episode.

I have some funky hardware thing going on! LOL!!
 
*LTD* said:
Then nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Click to expand...

Until you realize that the inter galactic ship you have chosen for this mission has it's controls written in Flash, the controller program crashes, and you smash into a nearby dead star.

They find you 40,000 years later, the only thing they can make out of the mangled pile of wires and bone is a sad jigsaw puzzle. To which the scientist exclaims "This place is ancient, they used an old witchcraft technique called Flash."

But I might be reading too far into it.

(On topic) The beta also allows my girlfriends parents eMac watch youtube, but it's not quite stable yet.
 
TraceyS/FL said:
HA. I had my MBP running about 7000 attemping to watch an episode of Caprica last week. They were so loud I couldn't even watch it.

The next day, they never went over 2500 watching the same episode.

I have some funky hardware thing going on! LOL!!
Click to expand...

O/T:

So how is Caprica compared to BSG? It's supposed to take place before BSG, or so I'm told.
 
*LTD* said:
O/T:

So how is Caprica compared to BSG? It's supposed to take place before BSG, or so I'm told.
Click to expand...

I"ve only watched the pilot, and the ORIGINAL BSG. I figured that this one showing the beginning might not bug me! LOL!!

I liked it - part 1 of the Premiere is/was free on iTunes, and part 2 is on syfy.com (what a stupid name). I probably won't remember to watch it weekly though (life issues) and will end up watching it on DVDs from Netflix. Or buying it if it drops to 99 cents an episode!

If the Premiere hadn't been free on iTunes - i probably would not have started watching it btw.
 
You might want to post your OS, because certain things might work different under the different OS.

Sketh said:
Until you realize that the inter galactic ship you have chosen for this mission has it's controls written in Flash, the controller program crashes, and you smash into a nearby dead star.

They find you 40,000 years later, the only thing they can make out of the mangled pile of wires and bone is a sad jigsaw puzzle. To which the scientist exclaims "This place is ancient, they used an old witchcraft technique called Flash."

But I might be reading too far into it.

(On topic) The beta also allows my girlfriends parents eMac watch youtube, but it's not quite stable yet.
Click to expand...

LOL nice.
 
Sketh said:
(On topic) The beta also allows my girlfriends parents eMac watch youtube, but it's not quite stable yet.
Click to expand...

"not quite stable yet" -- sounds like it is about time for Adobe to put it's stamp of approval on it and release it as "good enough."
 
Consultant said:
You might want to post your OS, because certain things might work different under the different OS.
Click to expand...

Snow Leopard 10.6.2 using latest Firefox.

CylonGlitch said:
"not quite stable yet" -- sounds like it is about time for Adobe to put it's stamp of approval on it and release it as "good enough."
Click to expand...

What Flash release is actually stable? It's probably their best release so far, even in beta.

So apparently someone moved this to another forum section even though I clearly put it into the iPad forum because people there are talking about flash running slow 24/7. Guess nobody there will actually read this now and benefit. I know I've never ever visited this subsection of the site. Really mods, really? How annoying...whatever. Guess I just won't contribute next time?
 
macduke said:
So apparently someone moved this to another forum section even though I clearly put it into the iPad forum because people there are talking about flash running slow 24/7. Guess nobody there will actually read this now and benefit. I know I've never ever visited this subsection of the site. Really mods, really? How annoying...whatever. Guess I just won't contribute next time?
Click to expand...

At the end of the day, it IS instructions on how to uninstall and reinstall Flash on a PC/Mac, not the iPad.
 
I installed flash 10.1 on my unibody Macbook Pro with Mac OS X 10.6.2 a few hours ago.

CPU usage on a high-def flash video in gametrailers.com went from 80% to around 66 % for the flash plugin according to activity monitor, Which is a very nice welcome.

However, Youtube doesn't work anymore for me (on both firefox 3.6 and safari 4), so I had to go back to the old version.

Does anybody else have this problem?
 
macduke said:
So apparently someone moved this to another forum section even though I clearly put it into the iPad forum because people there are talking about flash running slow 24/7. Guess nobody there will actually read this now and benefit. I know I've never ever visited this subsection of the site. Really mods, really? How annoying...whatever. Guess I just won't contribute next time?
Click to expand...

We ask that you post a topic in the sub-forum to which it applies. When in doubt, you can use one of the ones that seems like a closest fit. This post has nothing to do with the iPad, except that people who are interested in the iPad or not interested in the iPad have strong feelings about Flash. It does have to do with OS X. This is the only reason it was moved, and I did take a look at the post before I moved it.
 
I don't really want flash involved in my browsing experience, let alone a BETA version...
 
Just installed the beta and it made a 100% improvement for me. I'm on a 2.1Ghz G5 iMac with 2.5 gigs of ram running leopard . Flash was basically unwatchable before this, especially Vimeo. Now it works smoothly 95% of the time. Still not perfect, but a huge improvement. Thanks for posting.
 
Flash is awesome.. it is the best thing to ever happen to computers.
The code for it on OSX is so streamlined and beautiful.. like a pearl even.
It loads and plays HD movies beautifully. Stutter-free and has extra code
to take advantage of the great nVidia chips in our Macs. Its great that
such a beautiful product could come to us in such a way.

I wish.


Flash on OSX is a bloated turd. WITH peanuts and corn in it.
 
I spoke too soon, should have given it a more thorough test. The beta is a definite improvement, but flash still sucks.
 
Partial download problems...

So I downloaded the 13 MB Installer file in a few seconds but the 337 KB Uninstaller is taking forever to download.

What does this tell us?!?
 
picture32f90a.png


My browser has crashed 3 times since installing this. Thanks for trying though, Adobe.
 
Is the new Flash Player 64 bit? I'm a Flash game dev, and my games play perfectly in Safari set to 32 bit mode, but bug out in 64 bit mode.

I'm not sure why you guys think that watching huge videos in Flash has anything to do with what we would call 'Flash performance' though (mainly actionscript, vector rendering speed). 1080p is just passing along h.264 video, Flash just doesn't work as closely with the hardware as Quicktime does, but Quicktime CPU usage is still hella high while watching 1080p movies, unless you're doing that in hardware, which is pretty new for Apple, hopefully Flash starts using it too (seems to be the only thing actually using the GPU for running code, openCL fail so far).
 
Yeah, Safari kept crashing on me too. Had to uninstall the beta and go back to the current version. Oh well.
 
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