Lucky Macs get Flash speed bump
Jobsian inconsistency?
Updated A lucky chunk of Apple Mac owners can now enjoy hardware-accelerated Flash video — not all Mac owners, mind you, but that's not Adobe's fault.
"You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage," writes Thibault Imbert, product manager for Adobe's Flash Player, on his ByteArray.org blog.
The new version of the Flash Player (for Mac OS 10.6.3 and above) is available for download here. After you grab a copy, though, we suggest that you take a control-click Show Package Contents trip into the Adobe Flash Player.pkg's Info.plist file to make sure that the version you download is 10.1.82.76 — that's the one with the new H.264 acceleration. According to Imbert: "It may take a few hours to get propagated."
Apple — as world+dog is all too aware — has an ongoing love/hate relationship with Adobe's Flash. Steve Jobs has called it "buggy" and a "CPU hog", and famously banned it from his company's iPhone/Pad/Pods, suggesting in an open letter: "Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."
But despite this Jobsian disrespect, Apple surprisingly added hardware-acceleration hooks to Mac OS 10.6.3, which debuted on March 29 — perhaps entirely coincidentally only a month after independent testing showed that hardware acceleration raised Flash performance to that of video performance in Jobs' beloved HTML5.
Apple's introduction of the Video Decode Acceleration framework in 10.6.3 was too late for Adobe to incorporate into Flash 10.1, which debuted on June 10. Adobe did, however, launch a beta effort codenamed Gala in late April — the debetafication of that effort is what's now available.
Unfortunately, Cupertino's hardware-acceleration beneficence is minimal. As explained in Apple Technical Note TN2267, the new video-boosting framework introduced in Mac OS 10.6.3 (and carried over into 10.6.4, released in mid-June) only works on Macs equipped with Nvidia GeForce 9400M, 320M, and GT 330M graphics.
If you'd like to try out Adobe's Flash Player 10.1.82.76, first check your Mac's graphics capabilities, either in Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info > Graphics/Displays, or by scanning the list of Macs that use the Nvidia GeForce 9400M and 320M here — and add the newly redesigned Mac mini to the list of 320M-equipped machines. The GT 330M is used in current MacBook Pros.
When — if? — Apple plans to expand the range of graphics subsystems that can take advantage of the Video Decode Acceleration framework is a secret known only in the halls of One Infinite Loop.
Until that effort gets the Jobsian go-ahead, owners of, for example, a new iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 5670 or a new Mac Pro with an ATI Radeon HD 5770 or 5870 won't benefit from hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding, and the "CPU hog" epithet will remain in effect. ®
Update
When first published, this article had mistakenly listed the supported graphics subsystems for Flash 10.1.82.76 to include the Nvidia GeForce GT 320M. The correct part — as the article now states — is the GeForce 320M.
COMMENTS
apple are pulling a microsoft?
There, I've insulted both ms and apple fans at the same time.
There's no denying that keeping OS APIs to oneself while leaving competitors to use inferior APIs is a move strait from the MS playbook, pre-injunction of course.
@AC
I'm assuming that other H.264 videos play without turning on the fan because they are already Hardware Accelerated?
The update allows Flash to do the same, so makes it perform the same
*sigh*
As much as I agree to a small extent Flash is a bit of a pain in the ass at times, it has at least made it simple to watch and get video on the web when the other standards provided at best very kludgy ways of doing so.
However, I will be wasting my breath trying to get you to read the article again and see that for once, Adobe ain't the one to point your finger at.
But then if Steve Jobs shat in your sandwich, it would be still Adobe's fault given the utter failure of logic and reasoning that seems to be applied to the whole Adobe Flash and Apple debate.
Re: H.264
I stand with the anti-flash crowd for my own reasons, but it sounds to me that you just missed the whole point of the article.
@Penti
Generally speaking, on the windows side, drivers are expected to expose a standard Direct-X/Media interface, and any application using that interface can be hardware accelerated.
What I'm getting at is, that if an app is written to supports directx on one piece of hardware, it generally should work on another without alteration. On windows, it would be very bad practice to talk directly to the drivers outside of the standard interface except in very special cases.
"It wouldn't have been anything stopping Adobe from talking to the drivers directly. (Provided Nvidia helped them. Which they did on Windows any way.)."
I'll admit to being clueless about mac os internals, but you seem to imply that there is no standard for media acceleration which can be accessed without a proprietary driver interface. Is that true? In my opinion, an app developer should never need to "talk to the drivers directly".
If a standard accelerated interface exists and adobe is not using it, then yes that's their fault. However if there is no standard accelerated interface, or if it doesn't work on all hardware, then it's more apple's fault.
