[rortian]

It's hard not to be condescending about this but this is super basic: Video is hard if it is not hardware accelerated.

Apple refuses to provide a public api for this, so flash video needs a lot of CPU time on OSX.

All cell phones that allow flash video will have hardware acceleration and will not have a problem with it.

[blasdel]

Please don't parrot Nack's talking points.

Flash on Windows has only had hardware accelerated video decoding for about 6 months, on minority hardware, in beta versions of Flash 10.1. It hasn't been released yet. No cellphones with full Flash players have been shipped yet either, despite breathless press releases going back years.

Unaccelerated Flash on Windows handles video decoding just fine, and has for years, with no special hardware or APIs available. It's squarely Adobe's problem.

[rortian]

It seems to be the users of OSX problem. Window's is much more flexible about allow the access to hardware.

I wasn't parroting talking points...I just have experience with video on linux unaccelerated and it is not fun at all. The direct acceleration of video decoding is relatively new but I'm sure the Android versions with use this feature.

Thanks for info. Chill on the paranoia .

[blasdel]

Yes, hardware acceleration is nice, but the lack of raw access to it isn't the issue here. Flash has always worked fine on Windows without it.

Apple's position is that if you want to decode+display video, it would be best to use the QT API with the codecs they ship, and get acceleration for free where available. Given Adobe's track record, they don't want them mucking about in the bowels of the video drivers.

Accelerated video drivers were the number one location of kernel panics on Windows XP, so Microsoft spent a lot of effort to rearchitect the system in Vista, where it now causes a "kernel oops" instead, and the user just gets a 2s pause and a taskbar notification while the driver reloads. They took a lot of grief from users over the slightly decreased performance and the transition when their drivers didn't work at all, but it was the right thing for them to do. Apple has not yet needed to invest in this.

The Flash plugin is by far the most common cause of application crash reports on Mac OS X. Nearly every user experienced them, I used to get them on a daily basis! Very few of their users have ever seen the OS X kernel panic screen, especially without having failing hardware, and Apple would like to keep it that way.

[hexley]

Adobe's excuse about not having a hardware acceleration API is a red herring, and a painfully obvious lie if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. There are several datapoints.

This is clearly demonstrated when you play a video "natively" through flash on OS X. Watch as the < SD resolution video immediately hogs an entire core of your CPU; in fact the lagging starts almost from the moment the flash object is initialized! Even a trivial operation like clicking fullscreen on a YouTube video locks up the entire host process and beachballs Safari for 5+ seconds as it sits there with it's thumbs stuck up it's arse, causing you to miss whatever was playing at the time.

Ok, so now try playing the same video through XP etc on VMWare or Parallels on the same machine. What's this? It's perfectly responsive and uses a small fraction of the CPU power? Apparently it is ≈5x less CPU intensive to emulate and deal with the overhead of virtualising an entire PC, it's CPU and associated operating system than it is to run the same thing natively on the host OS. *Note that due to limitations inherent in virtualisation, there is no access to any kind of video acceleration whatsoever, let alone assisted h.264 decoding. You have a framebuffer and that's about it (and even that highly abstracted, double buffered, composited and managed by Quartz as with every other window on the system)

My original MacBook which I still use has no hardware assist (GMA950) - yet QuickTime manages playback of fullscreen or windowed 1920x1080 h264 at around the same CPU usage playing a fucking YouTube video does!

Flash video on the mac has always been excruciatingly slow, even before h.264. I remember seeing iMac G3 600Mhz's struggling to maintain even 15fps with postage-stamp sized h.261 (which is what YouTube used to use) just 5 odd years ago. A G3 600 is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what is required to playback video of that complexity. A G4 867 can do 640x480 h264. Clearly something is very very rotten in flash, and getting more offensively pungent by the day.

Which now brings me to:

What in the everloving FUCK could their code possibly be doing?!?!

I think their programmers have quite clearly gone insane and subscribed to (or invented?) the Rube Goldberg school of software engineering - I don't see any other rational explanation.

I'm quite certain we could have cured cancer while making SETI look like the equivalent of someone with a funnel in their ear and aimed at the sky with the aggregate difference in CPU cycles of mac flash vs windows.

If Adobe can't even manage to lie effectively about the reasons why their own software is so utterly broken, well, I'm not holding my breath for a resolution. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, though if you ask them it's all Apple's fault.

To think that people want flash on the iPhone. God almighty, haven't we all suffered enough?

[rortian]

> The 7xx family had its shortcomings, namely lack of SMP support and SIMD capabilities and a relatively weak FPU.

G3->G4 is apples to oranges. Video can run much better on SIMD.

A feature of parallels:

>Windows Aero is now available by default for machines with Intel GMAX 3100 and GMA 950 graphic adapters

You have no idea what you are talking about.