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by blasdel 5965 days ago
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.
1 comments
rortian 5964 days ago
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 .

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blasdel 5964 days ago
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.

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