ARM and Adobe join up

NEXT YEAR is all about the mobile internet device, so the following announcement is a bit expected: ARM and Adobe have joined forces to optimise Flash video and content on Arm11-based devices.

Considering some of the most popular websites on the interweb today use FLV as a video format for their... uhm... videos, it’s no surprise that Arm and Adobe are teaming up to catch the mobile device choo-choo.

The companies will jointly develop Flash 10 and Adobe AIR optimisations for ARM11 and Mali-based devices (Mali being ARM’s GPU), in the hope that it will make as much of a success on mobile devices as they are on full-blown PCs.

Flash 10, or rather, Flash’s video format *.FLV is the cornerstone of Youtube, in case you didn’t know. So you can imagine where this is going. AIR, on the other hand, is Adobe’s virtual machine that’ll allow you to run their code without the need for a browser and plug-in.

ARM has its finger in just about every digital pie you can imagine, from smartphones to consoles to set-top boxes. Combine that with optimised code execution and a highly sought-after video tool and you’ve got something of a winner, think ye not?

The thing is that optimising your browser experience for the gazillion mobile devices out there – each with its own screen size, resolution and interface – is a fair bit more complicated than just rescaling a page or parsing for a particular resolution. Vector-based graphics compounded with a bit of intelligent video scaling is just what the doctor ordered for the abundance of screen sizes and formats the market has.

The technology will run on the OpenGL ES2.0 API, supported by most device vendors either through ARM’s Mali GPU or their own, proprietary, graphics hardware. Nvidia, Broadcom, Samsung, Freescale and TI are pointed as potential adopters, but Korean and Japanese media player vendors have built device based on Flash for ages now. This is largely due to the technology's ability to display the characters needed in the native language and in English at no processing overhead.

AIR on ARM would allow the development of hardware-driven GUIs, for example. This could also signal that Adobe will give the widget-like app scene a go, given its intrinsic knowledge of the architecture.

The tech should launch in the second half of 2009. µ