Seriously, do you even use Adobe CS products. You seem to be just copying what others say. As a matter of fact, "innovative" is a good thing.
I recently purchased the latest version of Adobe CS5 Master Suite and took classes this summer on how to use certain applications within the suite. I must say that an unnecessary degree of time was spent with the very kind and patient instructor (who uses both Mac and PC platforms) asking him to explain why Adobe seemed to do little "aggravating" things that would not be tolerated within the human interface for a program that Apple wrote.
His take was an interesting one - he said that it was his impression that both Adobe and Apple have global views for their own software environments that do not reflect or incorporate to a great degree what the other is doing or has done well. As a result, they often pass each other like two ships in the night, oblivious of their respective incongruities until they are forced to "collide" with each other *e.g., the recent Flash example). The bottom line, in his opinion, was that either would be immeasurably enriched were the other not in existence, but the computer world at large would be greatly compromised.
This was different, according to him from what he perceived as a malice-driven intent, wherein (his example) Microsoft releases Word for Mac but intentionally cripples it so that it will not have all the advantages of Word for Windows.
On the other hand, remember that I am brand new at all this Adobe lore and may have misunderstood the obvious intent of what he was trying to say. I am not trying to be unfair to either Adobe or Apple - just reporting what was said on the off-chance that others may be able to contribute or better define the rough parameters of my own understanding.
Well I just installed this and can't say I notice a huge difference... Jon Stewart used 30% CPU before and still does, although I haven't tried Hulu yet. I have a MacMini 2009 (9400M)
I have an identical Mini. Did the upgrade. And that site keeps on flashing (pun intended) when loaded. Is yours stable?
Should I have re-installed the whole Flash or is there some way to just upgrade?
I don't think it's your Mac as it does the same on my Vista machine (Flash 10.1). I've got Flash 10.1 on my Macbook '09 too, but I think I'll wait until the "Gala" HD accelerated version is out of beta.
I'll be happy when flash is gone, but in the mean time this will be nice for my notebook and perhaps PS3. The PS3 nearly falls over whenever there's a flash movie, which is a shame since it's ideal for watching internet TV.
I recently purchased the latest version of Adobe CS5 Master Suite and took classes this summer on how to use certain applications within the suite. I must say that an unnecessary degree of time was spent with the very kind and patient instructor (who uses both Mac and PC platforms) asking him to explain why Adobe seemed to do little "aggravating" things that would not be tolerated within the human interface for a program that Apple wrote.
His take was an interesting one - he said that it was his impression that both Adobe and Apple have global views for their own software environments that do not reflect or incorporate to a great degree what the other is doing or has done well. As a result, they often pass each other like two ships in the night, oblivious of their respective incongruities until they are forced to "collide" with each other *e.g., the recent Flash example). The bottom line, in his opinion, was that either would be immeasurably enriched were the other not in existence, but the computer world at large would be greatly compromised.
This was different, according to him from what he perceived as a malice-driven intent, wherein (his example) Microsoft releases Word for Mac but intentionally cripples it so that it will not have all the advantages of Word for Windows.
On the other hand, remember that I am brand new at all this Adobe lore and may have misunderstood the obvious intent of what he was trying to say. I am not trying to be unfair to either Adobe or Apple - just reporting what was said on the off-chance that others may be able to contribute or better define the rough parameters of my own understanding.
Have a great day, all!
You do make a pertinent point about Adobe Creative Suite, and thanks for sharing your thoughts.
CS3 and CS4 are actually quite useable and though there are differences on both platforms, it's fairly smooth.
In terms of interfaces, certainly Adobe does things their way. Almost any "pro" level application doesn't quite exactly follow all the GUI conventions of their host operating systems. It's tough to do, because pro applications have so much more functions compared to regular applications.
You probably weren't using Adobe during the heady days of CS and CS2. The problem, was, this was when Apple transitioned to Intel. You had to, IIRC, run CS2 in Rosetta mode on Intel Macs, which was, not what you wanted to do when the deadline was around the corner, to say the least. During this time and say circa 2003, there was also other weirdness like Dreamweaver not having proper tabbed document windows on the Mac.
I wouldn't say Adobe is malicious, but they keeping up with Apple has always been a tenuous proposition. First was the transition to OS X. Then the transition to Intel. Then to Cocoa. Then to 64-bit. Somehow they were enough on the same page recently for software users to enjoy Adobe stuff on the Mac. Not all the blame can be put on Adobe, to be fair, Apple moves in certain directions and you can't expect Adobe to follow lockstep at every turn.
The sore point emerged due to iPhone and iPad being so huge, and Apple outright denying Flash usage. Adobe's assumption was always, well, we can release anything on the Mac as long as customers are happy *enough* with it, or they have no choice (eg. Flash websites and videos). The game changed when Adobe Flash and especially the big selling point of converting Flash to iPhone apps, was disallowed on iOS. This was a big shift. Suddenly Adobe is like, WTF?
I have an identical Mini. Did the upgrade. And that site keeps on flashing (pun intended) when loaded. Is yours stable?
Should I have re-installed the whole Flash or is there some way to just upgrade?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Surfer Rosa
I don't think it's your Mac as it does the same on my Vista machine (Flash 10.1). I've got Flash 10.1 on my Macbook '09 too, but I think I'll wait until the "Gala" HD accelerated version is out of beta.
I'll be happy when flash is gone, but in the mean time this will be nice for my notebook and perhaps PS3. The PS3 nearly falls over whenever there's a flash movie, which is a shame since it's ideal for watching internet TV.
Does it work with, say, a computer with Flash 9? It could be a bug in the site. Looks like it's somehow looping when it's not supposed to... You can right click on the site, untick "Loop" and it stops flashing. But then some other components keep popping and disappearing.
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...
Ah, but VLC is finely engineered. I'm not sure what parts exactly are hardware-accelerated, but a 480p-ish XVID AVI on my 2ghz Macbook Aluminum takes up only 10% CPU. Could Adobe learn something from VLC? Maybe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook
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...
I understand what you're trying to say. But then, how come VLC runs so great on OS X compared to Flash videos? I know VLC primarily uses ffmpeg, does Adobe use that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook
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.
I tried cineXplayer on iPad, it does work well for some videos, it doesn't read some videos. I ponied up $4.99 for OPlayerHD, which was able to play back my xvid avi files. The latter played back the files but frame rates were suffering. The author claims that the next few revisions of the app will be able to do smooth 720p XVID AVI decoding without dropping frames.
I don't think Apple will yank these. I mean of course it will be used for basically all kinds of DVD rips, TV shows, and torrents, etc. But it's too late in the game to clamp down on these, PR wise it could be risky. I mean, they just play back other video formats, I don't see Apple being so protective of iTunes downloads.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook
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.
See that's the thing too. Do we blame ATI or Adobe/other software makers in this case? Because if software makers wrote for CUDA, does that mean ATI must be left behind? Was ATI's Stream that bad or what?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook
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.
Interestingly, 9600M GT is not mentioned, which would be even more controversial. The thing I would like to point out is, sure, hardware decoding is all nice and sexy, but if we set aside that for a while, could CPU-only Flash video decoding be improved? Again, I'm just throwing out VLC as an example ~ why is it so fantastic on Mac and Windows?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook
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.
Well I just installed this and can't say I notice a huge difference... Jon Stewart used 30% CPU before and still does, although I haven't tried Hulu yet. I have a MacMini 2009 (9400M)
Tell John Stewart to get his own machine and stop using yours. He can afford it.
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.
Originally Posted by kolchak:
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.
so can i play devil's advocate here and say that Adobe is "being held hostage waiting for a FIRST party vendor to update it's software" ...as Steve Jobs would say?
The new adobe hardware accelerated flash build only supports nvidia chips when the new macs are shipping with ati chipsets only, now you know why flash is not allowed in ios devices.
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...
Well the thing that crashes them most assuredly is the new Stratos player from blip.tv. Other times I just get weird quirky failures like Wix.com Flash Sites simply not working. Oddly, YouTube's Flash Player as well as some others (Like embeds from MSNBC eg. of the Rachel Maddow Show clips) work fine. But when I call upon a blip.tv embed to play or interact with several other Flash players, the Browser hangs. Whether its Safari, Firefox or Chrome.
Just to clarify something about "hardware acceleration" here... the movie codec acceleration is not using OpenCL, it is using dedicated hardware on the GPU designed specifically for decoding movies. It isn't using the stream processors at all, AFAIK. While you could use OpenCL for doing this, it would be less efficient than using the purpose-built hardware that exists there for this purpose.
My understanding of the Mac's driver architecture isn't particularly sophisticated, but I believe that Apple had simply not prioritized putting an API in place to allow this specialized decode hardware to be used... and now that they have, thus far only the nVidia drivers have been updated to use it. I would guess that it is possible for the ATI drivers to be similarly updated, and for the new Apple machines I expect driver updates to be coming for other reasons... and perhaps those updates will include similar movie decode support. It is possible that the nVidia and ATI hardware is different enough and Apple's API is specific enough that it can't be made to work on ATI, but this would greatly surprise me. Apple is usually pretty good about their API design in this respect. Drivers are finicky things and take time to develop.
Its all pretty academic on the latest machines though. Just yesterday I happened to be watching some YouTube videos while having ActivityMonitor open, and I noticed that playing a video caused only a slightly elevation in one of the CPU threads load.
Just to clarify something about "hardware acceleration" here... the movie codec acceleration is not using OpenCL, it is using dedicated hardware on the GPU designed specifically for decoding movies. It isn't using the stream processors at all, AFAIK. While you could use OpenCL for doing this, it would be less efficient than using the purpose-built hardware that exists there for this purpose.
My understanding of the Mac's driver architecture isn't particularly sophisticated, but I believe that Apple had simply not prioritized putting an API in place to allow this specialized decode hardware to be used... and now that they have, thus far only the nVidia drivers have been updated to use it. I would guess that it is possible for the ATI drivers to be similarly updated, and for the new Apple machines I expect driver updates to be coming for other reasons... and perhaps those updates will include similar movie decode support. It is possible that the nVidia and ATI hardware is different enough and Apple's API is specific enough that it can't be made to work on ATI, but this would greatly surprise me. Apple is usually pretty good about their API design in this respect. Drivers are finicky things and take time to develop.
Its all pretty academic on the latest machines though. Just yesterday I happened to be watching some YouTube videos while having ActivityMonitor open, and I noticed that playing a video caused only a slightly elevation in one of the CPU threads load.
Can you please give an honest assessment on whether within 1.5 years Adobe could have developed a Flash video/other player that leverages OpenCL on the Mac. That would help us try and understand what's going on.
Also, would you say that this GPU decoding is largely irrelevant for anything with a 2ghz Core i3 or greater?
Also, why is VLC so good compared to Flash, when it comes to video playback and CPU use...?
Well I just installed this and can't say I notice a huge difference... Jon Stewart used 30% CPU before and still does, although I haven't tried Hulu yet. I have a MacMini 2009 (9400M)
with Apple being 5-10% of the pc market, Adobe only allocates about the same amount of resource to OSX development. figure CS takes about 95% of that and the remaining 5% is fought for between the two persons that work for flash and lightroom cubicles.
Seriously, do you even use Adobe CS products. You seem to be just copying what others say. As a matter of fact, "innovative" is a good thing.
Well, actually, it's true. I've been using Adobe's suite for more than a decade now and they do just get more and more bloated each step they move along. Some of the products, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro, just make me want to cry every time I have to spend hours using them. On the flip-side, I have to upgrade once and a while because of important features (64 bit support combined with two iterations behind in release) and Adobe's infuriating habit of ignoring serious bugs in fairly recent software releases (this infuriates me more than anything else). They make some of the best tools for what I do, so I use them, but I don't have the greatest amount of respect for them.
Funny thing adobe only supports nvidia. Apple just released their mac pros and aren't offering nvidia as an option. Once again adobe fails by falling behind.
Sorry, lack of GPU choice on Mac Pro is one of the most glaring reasons that I never recomend them unless one needs a specific Mac only app that needs PCIe interface cards. a $3000 "workstation" that cant do SLI Quadro FX cards is a joke, a really nice looking joke with a fast pair of CPUs...Apple needs to abandon the Macs, open source OSX and focus on iOS, let the community run with OSX since Apple delivers shite hardware on the high end for their amazing software
Sorry, lack of GPU choice on Mac Pro is one of the most glaring reasons that I never recomend them unless one needs a specific Mac only app that needs PCIe interface cards. a $3000 "workstation" that cant do SLI Quadro FX cards is a joke, a really nice looking joke with a fast pair of CPUs...Apple needs to abandon the Macs, open source OSX and focus on iOS, let the community run with OSX since Apple delivers shite hardware on the high end for their amazing software
A legitimate complaint for some of the Mac Pro uses, but a large part of their audience gets along perfectly well with Apple's GPU selection. Open Sourcing OSX is horrible counter-productive disaster of a suggestion.
Comments
Seriously, do you even use Adobe CS products. You seem to be just copying what others say. As a matter of fact, "innovative" is a good thing.
I recently purchased the latest version of Adobe CS5 Master Suite and took classes this summer on how to use certain applications within the suite. I must say that an unnecessary degree of time was spent with the very kind and patient instructor (who uses both Mac and PC platforms) asking him to explain why Adobe seemed to do little "aggravating" things that would not be tolerated within the human interface for a program that Apple wrote.
His take was an interesting one - he said that it was his impression that both Adobe and Apple have global views for their own software environments that do not reflect or incorporate to a great degree what the other is doing or has done well. As a result, they often pass each other like two ships in the night, oblivious of their respective incongruities until they are forced to "collide" with each other *e.g., the recent Flash example). The bottom line, in his opinion, was that either would be immeasurably enriched were the other not in existence, but the computer world at large would be greatly compromised.
This was different, according to him from what he perceived as a malice-driven intent, wherein (his example) Microsoft releases Word for Mac but intentionally cripples it so that it will not have all the advantages of Word for Windows.
On the other hand, remember that I am brand new at all this Adobe lore and may have misunderstood the obvious intent of what he was trying to say. I am not trying to be unfair to either Adobe or Apple - just reporting what was said on the off-chance that others may be able to contribute or better define the rough parameters of my own understanding.
Have a great day, all!
Well I just installed this and can't say I notice a huge difference... Jon Stewart used 30% CPU before and still does, although I haven't tried Hulu yet. I have a MacMini 2009 (9400M)
What happens if you access this site:
http://www.e2-series.com/
I have an identical Mini. Did the upgrade. And that site keeps on flashing (pun intended) when loaded. Is yours stable?
Should I have re-installed the whole Flash or is there some way to just upgrade?
What happens if you access this site:
http://www.e2-series.com/
I have an identical Mini. Did the upgrade. And that site keeps on flashing (pun intended) when loaded. Is yours stable?
Should I have re-installed the whole Flash or is there some way to just upgrade?
I don't think it's your Mac as it does the same on my Vista machine (Flash 10.1). I've got Flash 10.1 on my Macbook '09 too, but I think I'll wait until the "Gala" HD accelerated version is out of beta.
I'll be happy when flash is gone, but in the mean time this will be nice for my notebook and perhaps PS3. The PS3 nearly falls over whenever there's a flash movie, which is a shame since it's ideal for watching internet TV.
I recently purchased the latest version of Adobe CS5 Master Suite and took classes this summer on how to use certain applications within the suite. I must say that an unnecessary degree of time was spent with the very kind and patient instructor (who uses both Mac and PC platforms) asking him to explain why Adobe seemed to do little "aggravating" things that would not be tolerated within the human interface for a program that Apple wrote.
His take was an interesting one - he said that it was his impression that both Adobe and Apple have global views for their own software environments that do not reflect or incorporate to a great degree what the other is doing or has done well. As a result, they often pass each other like two ships in the night, oblivious of their respective incongruities until they are forced to "collide" with each other *e.g., the recent Flash example). The bottom line, in his opinion, was that either would be immeasurably enriched were the other not in existence, but the computer world at large would be greatly compromised.
This was different, according to him from what he perceived as a malice-driven intent, wherein (his example) Microsoft releases Word for Mac but intentionally cripples it so that it will not have all the advantages of Word for Windows.
On the other hand, remember that I am brand new at all this Adobe lore and may have misunderstood the obvious intent of what he was trying to say. I am not trying to be unfair to either Adobe or Apple - just reporting what was said on the off-chance that others may be able to contribute or better define the rough parameters of my own understanding.
Have a great day, all!
You do make a pertinent point about Adobe Creative Suite, and thanks for sharing your thoughts.
CS3 and CS4 are actually quite useable and though there are differences on both platforms, it's fairly smooth.
In terms of interfaces, certainly Adobe does things their way. Almost any "pro" level application doesn't quite exactly follow all the GUI conventions of their host operating systems. It's tough to do, because pro applications have so much more functions compared to regular applications.
You probably weren't using Adobe during the heady days of CS and CS2. The problem, was, this was when Apple transitioned to Intel. You had to, IIRC, run CS2 in Rosetta mode on Intel Macs, which was, not what you wanted to do when the deadline was around the corner, to say the least. During this time and say circa 2003, there was also other weirdness like Dreamweaver not having proper tabbed document windows on the Mac.
I wouldn't say Adobe is malicious, but they keeping up with Apple has always been a tenuous proposition. First was the transition to OS X. Then the transition to Intel. Then to Cocoa. Then to 64-bit. Somehow they were enough on the same page recently for software users to enjoy Adobe stuff on the Mac. Not all the blame can be put on Adobe, to be fair, Apple moves in certain directions and you can't expect Adobe to follow lockstep at every turn.
The sore point emerged due to iPhone and iPad being so huge, and Apple outright denying Flash usage. Adobe's assumption was always, well, we can release anything on the Mac as long as customers are happy *enough* with it, or they have no choice (eg. Flash websites and videos). The game changed when Adobe Flash and especially the big selling point of converting Flash to iPhone apps, was disallowed on iOS. This was a big shift. Suddenly Adobe is like, WTF?
The saga continues to unfold.
What happens if you access this site:
http://www.e2-series.com/
I have an identical Mini. Did the upgrade. And that site keeps on flashing (pun intended) when loaded. Is yours stable?
Should I have re-installed the whole Flash or is there some way to just upgrade?
I don't think it's your Mac as it does the same on my Vista machine (Flash 10.1). I've got Flash 10.1 on my Macbook '09 too, but I think I'll wait until the "Gala" HD accelerated version is out of beta.
I'll be happy when flash is gone, but in the mean time this will be nice for my notebook and perhaps PS3. The PS3 nearly falls over whenever there's a flash movie, which is a shame since it's ideal for watching internet TV.
Does it work with, say, a computer with Flash 9? It could be a bug in the site. Looks like it's somehow looping when it's not supposed to... You can right click on the site, untick "Loop" and it stops flashing. But then some other components keep popping and disappearing.
Even when Adobe moves in the right direction, you people sit here and bitch.
Well, the right direction would be to EOL Flash.
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...
Ah, but VLC is finely engineered. I'm not sure what parts exactly are hardware-accelerated, but a 480p-ish XVID AVI on my 2ghz Macbook Aluminum takes up only 10% CPU. Could Adobe learn something from VLC? Maybe.
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...
I understand what you're trying to say. But then, how come VLC runs so great on OS X compared to Flash videos? I know VLC primarily uses ffmpeg, does Adobe use that?
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.
I tried cineXplayer on iPad, it does work well for some videos, it doesn't read some videos. I ponied up $4.99 for OPlayerHD, which was able to play back my xvid avi files. The latter played back the files but frame rates were suffering. The author claims that the next few revisions of the app will be able to do smooth 720p XVID AVI decoding without dropping frames.
I don't think Apple will yank these. I mean of course it will be used for basically all kinds of DVD rips, TV shows, and torrents, etc. But it's too late in the game to clamp down on these, PR wise it could be risky. I mean, they just play back other video formats, I don't see Apple being so protective of iTunes downloads.
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.
See that's the thing too. Do we blame ATI or Adobe/other software makers in this case? Because if software makers wrote for CUDA, does that mean ATI must be left behind? Was ATI's Stream that bad or what?
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.
Interestingly, 9600M GT is not mentioned, which would be even more controversial. The thing I would like to point out is, sure, hardware decoding is all nice and sexy, but if we set aside that for a while, could CPU-only Flash video decoding be improved? Again, I'm just throwing out VLC as an example ~ why is it so fantastic on Mac and Windows?
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.
It's okay, my user name is not solipsism. (HAH!)
Well I just installed this and can't say I notice a huge difference... Jon Stewart used 30% CPU before and still does, although I haven't tried Hulu yet. I have a MacMini 2009 (9400M)
Tell John Stewart to get his own machine and stop using yours. He can afford it.
Originally Posted by djsherly:
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.
Originally Posted by kolchak:
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.
so can i play devil's advocate here and say that Adobe is "being held hostage waiting for a FIRST party vendor to update it's software" ...as Steve Jobs would say?
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...
Well the thing that crashes them most assuredly is the new Stratos player from blip.tv. Other times I just get weird quirky failures like Wix.com Flash Sites simply not working. Oddly, YouTube's Flash Player as well as some others (Like embeds from MSNBC eg. of the Rachel Maddow Show clips) work fine. But when I call upon a blip.tv embed to play or interact with several other Flash players, the Browser hangs. Whether its Safari, Firefox or Chrome.
My understanding of the Mac's driver architecture isn't particularly sophisticated, but I believe that Apple had simply not prioritized putting an API in place to allow this specialized decode hardware to be used... and now that they have, thus far only the nVidia drivers have been updated to use it. I would guess that it is possible for the ATI drivers to be similarly updated, and for the new Apple machines I expect driver updates to be coming for other reasons... and perhaps those updates will include similar movie decode support. It is possible that the nVidia and ATI hardware is different enough and Apple's API is specific enough that it can't be made to work on ATI, but this would greatly surprise me. Apple is usually pretty good about their API design in this respect. Drivers are finicky things and take time to develop.
Its all pretty academic on the latest machines though. Just yesterday I happened to be watching some YouTube videos while having ActivityMonitor open, and I noticed that playing a video caused only a slightly elevation in one of the CPU threads load.
Just to clarify something about "hardware acceleration" here... the movie codec acceleration is not using OpenCL, it is using dedicated hardware on the GPU designed specifically for decoding movies. It isn't using the stream processors at all, AFAIK. While you could use OpenCL for doing this, it would be less efficient than using the purpose-built hardware that exists there for this purpose.
My understanding of the Mac's driver architecture isn't particularly sophisticated, but I believe that Apple had simply not prioritized putting an API in place to allow this specialized decode hardware to be used... and now that they have, thus far only the nVidia drivers have been updated to use it. I would guess that it is possible for the ATI drivers to be similarly updated, and for the new Apple machines I expect driver updates to be coming for other reasons... and perhaps those updates will include similar movie decode support. It is possible that the nVidia and ATI hardware is different enough and Apple's API is specific enough that it can't be made to work on ATI, but this would greatly surprise me. Apple is usually pretty good about their API design in this respect. Drivers are finicky things and take time to develop.
Its all pretty academic on the latest machines though. Just yesterday I happened to be watching some YouTube videos while having ActivityMonitor open, and I noticed that playing a video caused only a slightly elevation in one of the CPU threads load.
Can you please give an honest assessment on whether within 1.5 years Adobe could have developed a Flash video/other player that leverages OpenCL on the Mac. That would help us try and understand what's going on.
Also, would you say that this GPU decoding is largely irrelevant for anything with a 2ghz Core i3 or greater?
Also, why is VLC so good compared to Flash, when it comes to video playback and CPU use...?
Well I just installed this and can't say I notice a huge difference... Jon Stewart used 30% CPU before and still does, although I haven't tried Hulu yet. I have a MacMini 2009 (9400M)
After the update, do you see this site correctly:
http://www.e2-series.com/
To me, it only flashes. Guess that's where the name comes? :P Does it look stable for you?
After the update, do you see this site correctly:
http://www.e2-series.com/
To me, it only flashes. Guess that's where the name comes? :P Does it look stable for you?
Weird, it was flashing before. Now it is fine.
Seriously, do you even use Adobe CS products. You seem to be just copying what others say. As a matter of fact, "innovative" is a good thing.
Well, actually, it's true. I've been using Adobe's suite for more than a decade now and they do just get more and more bloated each step they move along. Some of the products, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro, just make me want to cry every time I have to spend hours using them. On the flip-side, I have to upgrade once and a while because of important features (64 bit support combined with two iterations behind in release) and Adobe's infuriating habit of ignoring serious bugs in fairly recent software releases (this infuriates me more than anything else). They make some of the best tools for what I do, so I use them, but I don't have the greatest amount of respect for them.
Funny thing adobe only supports nvidia. Apple just released their mac pros and aren't offering nvidia as an option. Once again adobe fails by falling behind.
Sorry, lack of GPU choice on Mac Pro is one of the most glaring reasons that I never recomend them unless one needs a specific Mac only app that needs PCIe interface cards. a $3000 "workstation" that cant do SLI Quadro FX cards is a joke, a really nice looking joke with a fast pair of CPUs...Apple needs to abandon the Macs, open source OSX and focus on iOS, let the community run with OSX since Apple delivers shite hardware on the high end for their amazing software
Sorry, lack of GPU choice on Mac Pro is one of the most glaring reasons that I never recomend them unless one needs a specific Mac only app that needs PCIe interface cards. a $3000 "workstation" that cant do SLI Quadro FX cards is a joke, a really nice looking joke with a fast pair of CPUs...Apple needs to abandon the Macs, open source OSX and focus on iOS, let the community run with OSX since Apple delivers shite hardware on the high end for their amazing software
A legitimate complaint for some of the Mac Pro uses, but a large part of their audience gets along perfectly well with Apple's GPU selection. Open Sourcing OSX is horrible counter-productive disaster of a suggestion.