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Adobe accelerates video with Flash Player 10.2

Goes beyond H.264
Thu Feb 10 2011, 09:56

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Adobe has released Flash Player 10.2, adding hardware acceleration for the entire video pipeline.

Adobe's release of Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Mac and Linux is the first to feature full video pipeline hardware acceleration, which it calls "Stage Video". The firm claims Stage Video provides a 34X improvement in efficiency of video playback.

Previously Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 had supported hardware acceleration for H.264 video decoding, however Adobe claims Stage Video can "effortlessly play beautiful 1080p HD video with just 1-15 [per cent] CPU usage on a common Mac or Windows computer". Its definition of a common Mac or Windows computer is minimal and a bit vague, saying only, "we've tested a Mac Mini released two years ago and a low-powered GPU-enabled Windows netbook".

Nit-picking aside, Adobe's decision to fully accelerate the video pipeline should bring improvements to more than just video playback, with lower CPU utilisation leading to better battery life. Adobe made the rare move of warning that Adobe Flash 10.2 users might not see the benefits of Stage Video just yet, saying websites such as Youtube and Vimeo are still in the process of incorporating the new software.

Aside from video pipeline acceleration, Adobe has incorporated multiple display fullscreen support, custom mouse cursors, improvements in text rendering and support for Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 9 GPU rendering technology in Flash Player 10.2.

What is missing from Adobe's latest release notes is any reference to improved security. Features such as hardware acceleration are welcome, however many users would appreciate not having to worry about what vulnerabilities might lurk in Adobe's code. µ

 

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Reality

They give info on security fixes http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb11-02.html and http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/890/cpsid_89050.html#main_new%20features

What is missing is info from the media on all the 'improved' and enhanced and crippling DRM stuff they no doubt added, since we heard about their talks and agreements which included a requirement for even more of that.
In fact that's probably why the whole pipeline is now HW accelerated, it makes it harder to break in, it's all thought out long ago by MS with their DXVA already and this is just a re-run.

posted by : W.-, 11 February 2011 Complain about this comment
Less is More

16 Watts CPU usage less,
60 Watts GPU usage more...

posted by : Belgarian, 10 February 2011 Complain about this comment
Goes to show then ...

... how much Flash sucked before.

If they can improve something by as much as 34 times that's already an improvement over the last one, you'd come to think that Adobe can't do nothing right.

I hope the last few people will wake up and see that this Flash-nonsense is ridiculous in every possible way. They say it's platform independent, but you have to do things differently for each and everyone of them. First, you have to adapt your content for mobile usage, or else it will drain the battery in minutes. And now they fiddle with the video pipeline and again, the content creators have to adapt to make use of it.
Every time Adobe "improves" something, their customers have to go back to the drawing board and make it work first.

If you don't get it already this is the upshot: Flash is a complete mess underneath, programmed by monkeys throwing their feces at the keyboard.

posted by : riDDi, 10 February 2011 Complain about this comment
BBC Iplayer

never mind vimeo and youtube ... will the BBC sort out its iplayer streams so that they are recognized as being able to be handled by the GPU by flash 10.2? ... in early 10.1 beta they changed something so that later betas and the release version won't shift them off the CPU. I found a hacked version of the DLL which allows me to view iPlayer HD streams on my HP 311c (atom + ion) whereas with unhacked DLL it displays at less than 1fps!

posted by : David, 10 February 2011 Complain about this comment
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