Hardware acceleration added to Flash Player 10.1 for Mac

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 81
    Adobe is yesterday's news.
  • Reply 22 of 81
    sendmesendme Posts: 567member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by davidcarswell View Post


    I have an ATI Radeon 4870 hd in my mac pro. And flash runs like hell.





    Could you upgrade to an Nvidia card?
  • Reply 23 of 81
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by gotApple View Post


    I don't know what Flash smut you guys watch, I just watch the normal banner ads and play lots of Flash games, and Flash Player hasn't crashed for months here...



    ha ha. Really.

  • Reply 24 of 81
    kolchakkolchak Posts: 1,398member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by djsherly View Post


    The beauty of it is that if Adobe are using the documented APIs, once Apple get around to updating that support it should work right off the bat.



    I wouldn't hold my breath. Apple almost certainly won't add support for older cards. It's just not worth dedicating development resources to, in their opinion. They'd rather you upgraded to the latest and best.
  • Reply 25 of 81
    djsherlydjsherly Posts: 1,031member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kolchak View Post


    I wouldn't hold my breath. Apple almost certainly won't add support for older cards. It's just not worth dedicating development resources to, in their opinion. They'd rather you upgraded to the latest and best.



    Thinking more about the more recent ATI cards coming through.
  • Reply 26 of 81
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by razorpit View Post


    This is going to sound stupid BUT other than happening to catch stories such as this how does one know there are updates to flash? Are these updates installed automatically? I just ran a software update and my system was "up to date."



    Ironically, it's sometimes a bit confusing where to go to update Flash.



    Imagine users now having to worry, "Oh, I gotta get 10.something.something" etc. And depending on developer blogs and tech websites.



    That said,



    just use:

    http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

    to download the latest version of Flash.



    How do you know if you have the latest version? Go to

    http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about



    ...



    Adobe has just gotten too big and too bloated for their own good. Now they have to follow the Microsoft path of even more bloated "features" and "benefits" to keep you using their ecosystem. They keep adding tons of new products like Flex, Air, etc. and the PDF stuff is totally overblown nowadays.



    CS4 is alright, but not sure if CS5 is any kind of necessary upgrade at this stage for me.
  • Reply 27 of 81
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ACCELERATION is LIMITED on some systems:



    From http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1957



    Thibault Imbert wrote::

    Hi Ozren,

    What is your configuration ? The video you tried ? Remember there are some requirements in terms of OS version and graphics card and the dimensions of the content being decoded.

    For now :

    Hardware accelerated decode requires Mac OS X 10.6.3 and either NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M GPUs.

    Also :

    Video clips will a width of 864 fallback to software H264 decoding on the nVidia GeForce 9400M. This is a known limitation of the GeForce 9400M drivers. Unfortunately, YouTube Clips at 480p resolution often use a width of 864. Switch to 720p or 1080p to benefit from hardware acceleration for these clips. The hardware decoder will not be used for video with frame dimensions smaller than 480×320. For video smaller than that size, the cpu/speed improvements for using the GPU rather than the CPU are negligible.

    Those restrictions are dictated by NVIDIA and Apple.

    Thibault

    Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:34 pm #
  • Reply 28 of 81
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    1. It's up to Adobe to use OpenCL. It's been available for quite some while now, and as another poster mentioned, there was OpenGL GLSL.



    2. It's another case of Adobe blaming Apple



    ..."Oh dearie me, we are limited by Apple and Nvidia, blame them if you have 100% CPU video decoding on your Mac"



    ..."Oh dearie me, look at Apple, they don't let us put our buggy laggy piece of bollocks on iOS"



    3. Where are all these wonderful Adobe developments on mobile phones? Not that widespread yet. Will the Dell Streak have it? Oops, guess not.. "The device will ship with the older 1.6 version of Android. Over-the-air upgrades to Android 2.2 have been promised later this year".



    4. F**K Flash Video ... The faster it goes away the better.



    5. Again, THIS IS ALL WHAT OPENCL is for. Why is Adobe following a programming model that is dictated by specific cards and drivers ???



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kolchak View Post


    I wouldn't hold my breath. Apple almost certainly won't add support for older cards. It's just not worth dedicating development resources to, in their opinion. They'd rather you upgraded to the latest and best.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by djsherly View Post


    Thinking more about the more recent ATI cards coming through.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by gotApple View Post


    Steve wants you to upgrade. But cool, now Flash is very slick on MacBooks! No need to complain any more, Steve!



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Apple 1984 View Post


    Adobe is yesterday's news.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by d-range View Post


    While it is true that the particular API's flash player is using now are restricted to a few NVidia cards, various other options for hw accelerated video on OS X have been available to Adobe all the time. Snow Leopard has OpenCL which can be used to offload large parts of the decoding work, and before that bare-bones OpenGL GLSL would have been a possibility. I admit that it's not nearly as easy or convenient as getting almost a complete H264 decoder on a silver platter (the API's they are using right now), but Adobe is big enough to develop or buy a video decoder using one of these 2 alternatives. A GLSL or OpenCL based decoder would have the additional benefit of being portable to other systems such as Linux, which will probably never have hw accelerated Flash video because no standardized API for easy video playback exists on Linux at all. In fact, even on Windows there is nothing like the API's that Adobe is now using on OS X, Windows has DXVA, but that still requires quite a lot of effort, since it only provides a set of building blocks, not a full video decoding pipeline.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by RationalTroll View Post


    +1 Insightful



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by noirdesir View Post


    Adobe is using official Apple APIs to access the hardware acceleration, these APIs only provide access to (recent) Nvidia graphic cards.



    I don't know how easy it would be for Adobe to use other APIs that support hardware acceleration with a wider selection of video cards. I don't know whether such APIs even exist or whether other vendors program the hardware acceleration themselves. But the precise choice of supported graphic cards was made by Apple.



  • Reply 29 of 81
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by djsherly View Post


    The beauty of it is that if Adobe are using the documented APIs, once Apple get around to updating that support it should work right off the bat.



    Apple...Update...Support?



    Never in a million years. Apple is lagging so seriously on GPU support that it just isn't funny. By the time they update their API's, Nvidia and ATI will have moved on by several generations.



    But the sooner Flash goes away, the better.
  • Reply 30 of 81
    cnocbuicnocbui Posts: 3,613member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Jensonb View Post


    I wonder if this version also fixes te fact that Flash now crashes every browser on my Mac about 60% of the time.



    I can't recall Flash crashing my browser at any time. I am always scratching my head - figuratively - at all the problems and hatred people on here seem to have with Flash as I don't experience any issues.
  • Reply 31 of 81
    sendmesendme Posts: 567member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kolchak View Post


    I wouldn't hold my breath. Apple almost certainly won't add support for older cards. It's just not worth dedicating development resources to, in their opinion. They'd rather you upgraded to the latest and best.



    I bet Nvidia stock is going through the roof!
  • Reply 32 of 81
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    Oh, here's another Flash gem: think you're surfing's actually PRIVATE? Reset your history and cache? Think again.



    Go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/do...manager06.html



    Or

    http://www.macromedia.com/support/do...manager07.html



    Mmmm... Looks the like Flash plugin has been storing where you've been and not resetting it when you clear your history... Naughty naughty.
  • Reply 33 of 81
    noirdesirnoirdesir Posts: 1,027member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nvidia2008 View Post


    1. It's up to Adobe to use OpenCL. It's been available for quite some while now, and as another poster mentioned, there was OpenGL GLSL.



    Adobe is not the only one in not using the OpenCL for that, the leading free video player, VLC, also does not use OpenCL.
  • Reply 34 of 81
    freerangefreerange Posts: 1,597member
    What a POS. Only available for use with 3 graphics cards, and only the latest OS. Shows once again that Jobs was right on the money. Bring on HTML5!!!!!! Kill flash and free the web!
  • Reply 35 of 81
    anonymouseanonymouse Posts: 6,857member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by noirdesir View Post


    Adobe is not the only one in not using the OpenCL for that, the leading free video player, VLC, also does not use OpenCL.



    You realize, of course, that the above is not a valid argument for anything.
  • Reply 36 of 81
    razorpitrazorpit Posts: 1,796member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nvidia2008 View Post


    Ironically, it's sometimes a bit confusing where to go to update Flash.



    Imagine users now having to worry, "Oh, I gotta get 10.something.something" etc. And depending on developer blogs and tech websites.



    That said,



    just use:

    http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

    to download the latest version of Flash.



    How do you know if you have the latest version? Go to

    http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about



    Thanks, I'm a bit of a geek and I'll never remember to go to these sites to check for updates/upgrades. Makes you wonder what version the average Mac user is running....



    Can any one answer why there is no auto update process for Flash? Theoretically there can be some huge security holes open on thousands of machines.
  • Reply 37 of 81
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ruoppster View Post


    I have an iMac with a ATi x1600 graphic card. Anyone know how to hack Flash or OS X.6 for that matter to allow the graphic card to work on flash video, etc. I know that the card can do it its just that the OS/Flash doesnt support it and I was wondering if anyone figured a way to enable it for good.



    Thanks



    Ask Shantanu Narayen. He has a pretty good record of responding to open letters.
  • Reply 38 of 81
    zoolookzoolook Posts: 657member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nvidia2008 View Post




    5. Again, THIS IS ALL WHAT OPENCL is for. Why is Adobe following a programming model that is dictated by specific cards and drivers ???



    If you've used almost any video player on OS X, aside from Quicktime, there was no h.264 hardware decoding until very recently. It didn't matter if it was VLC, Boxee, XMBC or a derivative or Adobe's flash player or something else like Silverlight. Don't tell me, that's because no one other than Apple has a clue about coding, right? Wrong...



    Apple simply did not make the APIs available to allow this, and squawking 'that's what OpenCL is for' doesn't make any difference without the drivers supporting the rhetoric. The fact is, OS X has some very limited and fussy limitations when it comes to hardware video playback, and the only people to blame are Apple and their hardware partners.



    There is a very simple reason why Windows users have had better video playback performance than OS X users (outside of Quicktime/h.264), and it's because it's easy to implement, because ATI and nVidia (as well as Microsoft) and made it that way. Apple needs to get out of its own way...



    Now things are actually improving. There was an app released very recently on the iPad that allows you watch xVid videos revently in the .avi format (cineXplayer). There is no hardware acceleration but it doesn't appear to affect battery life - the bet is that Apple will yank it - personally I don't know why anyone would need to use xVid when h.264 conversion with Handbrake is far superior, but that's hardly the point.



    As for ATI... well, their hardware playback is a right mess, even on Windows. I know, I have a very powerful 4890 in my Windows gaming rig, and in particular hardware encode is low quality and buggy - so I fallback to the CPU, which luckily is a fast and inexpensive Phenom II from AMD.



    The 8600 not being supported is pretty contraversial... and you won't like the reason why. The 9400m is actually virtually identical to the 8600m... both have 16 stream processors and the 8600m has a slight bandwidth advantage because it has descrete memory, but aside from that, the performance is about the same. The 9600m has twice as many stream processors. So, the ONLY reason the 8600m is not supported, is because the OS X drivers don't allow it. That's not adobe's fault.



    Now, before you accuse me of anything, I love my 3 macs, my iPad and my iPhone, and I can't wait for Flash to die... but Apple has as much to answer for here as adobe.
  • Reply 39 of 81
    anonymouseanonymouse Posts: 6,857member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nvidia2008 View Post


    2. It's another case of Adobe blaming Apple



    ..."Oh dearie me, we are limited by Apple and Nvidia, blame them if you have 100% CPU video decoding on your Mac"



    ..."Oh dearie me, look at Apple, they don't let us put our buggy laggy piece of bollocks on iOS"



    It's always interesting to see a company with an alcoholic personality.
  • Reply 40 of 81
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by cnocbui View Post


    I can't recall Flash crashing my browser at any time. I am always scratching my head - figuratively - at all the problems and hatred people on here seem to have with Flash as I don't experience any issues.



    I can't remember the last time it crashed the browser on my Mac (though it does make it run very hot) but ironically it takes down the browser on my Windows laptop frequently, and its supposed to work better with Windows!
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