Adobe Goes To Flash 10.1, Forgoes Security Fix For 10 320
An anonymous reader writes "The recent critical zero-day security flaw in Flash 10 may have fast-tracked the release of Flash 10.1 today. Adobe 10.1 boasts the much anticipated H.264 hardware acceleration. Except for Linux and Mac OS (PDF): 'Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs.' Your humble anonymous reporter, who is using Fedora Linux with a ATI IGP 340M, is very pleased that the developers of the OSS drivers have provided hardware acceleration for my GPU ('glxinfo : direct rendering: Yes,' 'OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R100 (RS200 4337) 20090101 NO-TCL DRI2'), but even if Adobe did provide hardware acceleration for H.264 on Linux, they wouldn't provide it for me because they disable it for GPUs with SGI in the Client vendor string. Adobe 10.1, with all its goodness, now gives me around 95% CPU usage as opposed to about 75% with the previous release. Good times. I anticipate my Windows friends will have a much better experience."
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:3, Insightful)
The worst part about this is Apple already had two APIs, QTKit and CoreAnimation, that could both do hardware accelerated H.264. Adobe bitched and moaned until they got low level access for no apparent reason.
It seriously pissed me off every time Adobe whined about "no 3rd party H.264 support" on Mac. Apple even had several sessions at WWDC in years prior about how to enable it in your apps.
Re:well, of course. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's kill Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
Next time I see a commercial website that requires Flash, I'll call the vendor and explain why I can't use their website. Should help kill Flash once and for all.
That's good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
He who speaks Latin is doomed to repeat it?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:5, Insightful)
nspluginwrapper is not only unstable but it blocks keyboard input to flash. Using it is a complete waste of time.
Better off pressuring websites to dump flash.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:2, Insightful)
ahhh ginger bashing - the last bastion of socially acceptable discrimination - if only there were more of us like the fags, niggers or gooks (see what i've done there to make the point)
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem was that Adobe didn't move to the Cocoa framework which has these APIs but instead stayed on the Carbon framework which doesn't.
This is why Steve Jobs called Adobe "lazy" as Cocoa and Carbon were first released back in 2001. Adobe before CS5 of this year didn't migrate their flagship products to Cocoa. That's nine years...
Adobe is only slightly lazier than Apple themselves then, as Finder and quite a few other parts of OS X were still Carbon until Snow Leopard. That's eight years and they're the ones who developed the frameworks.
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:3, Insightful)
With the pressure from HTML5 and Apple, I guess Adobe figures now is a good time to fragment the Flash market. We no longer need Flash for Youtube, and we'll just have to suffer through not having dancing, blaring, advertisements. Strangely, I'm OK with this.
Linux currently lacks a developed standard AP (Score:4, Insightful)
So then why does Gnash have hardware acceleration?
Seems to me it is more likely the folks that can't even make a 64 bit client are the problem here.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really pretty simple: Adobe doesn't want to make the investment necessary to make the Flash player efficient, stable, secure, and bloat-free. On the other hand, they want to keep making money selling the Flash development tools.
So when Apple finally calls them on Flash's crappiness and starts pushing for standards, Adobe wages a PR war on Apple, including astroturfing to make it sound like techies and serious web developers all love Flash. Adobe claims they're just about to release some updates that will fix everything (and it doesn't matter if it's vaporware because it's all about PR) and tries to blame Apple for all of Flash's problems (even though it doesn't quite make sense).
In reality, Flash has never been well supported on any platform except Windows. However, if Adobe admits to that, then a lot of their pro-Flash anti-HTML5 arguments fall apart. They're trying to sell Flash as being ubiquitous and platform-independent, but it isn't.
Re:Let's kill Flash (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:1, Insightful)
There are two issues at work here. The first is that the codebase for Flash was written highly platform-specific with a lot of assembler for the stated reason of performance, and likely before Adobe even took it over it was unmaintainable. This is from statements by Macromedia developers on their blogs and the application of a little bit of intuition. Porting it is probably a fucking nightmare. Adobe's stuck supporting a dog codebase (yet) with a massive install base, they are probably also extremely frustrated that porting to 64-bit Intel, Linux and OS X has took forever and resulted in a product that fucking sucks.
Second, regarding Adobe products in general on OS X, it wasn't a remotely mature platform until Tiger, for many reasons. Compare the performance of OS X 10.0 through 10.3 on hardware available at that time, to running OS9. Slow as shit. At the time Apple was still saying they were going to deprecate Carbon, so making a native OS X Cocoa version would have been a huge undertaking. Mac users still weren't switching in large numbers yet. Every single point release had huge additions and some minor regressions. Macs may have been a significant part of Adobe's customer base, but focusing on the larger and more stable (Windows, in terms of API, already with acceleration) platform was a smart business decision.
I'm not denying stupidity and inertia at Adobe, but I think for years (and with the acquisition of Flash) they were stuck in a limbo where any significant push forward in a particular direction would incur very large business costs with very high risk.
Re:The new API is unusable (Score:5, Insightful)
See that 10_6_3 part, that's the version number.
As for 10.6, it is blazingly fast compared to anything prior. I only wish it hadn't broken so much linux and unix code that used to be easy to compile.
As far as I can tell the GP's post had no useful information in it whatsoever, just a troll.
As for Adobe's announcement, this is precisely why I, as a mac/linux user, was in favor of Jobs tell Adobe to go to hell. Flash has always sucked on anything non-windows, it's awful.
Re:Let's kill Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, it's costing the company money and pissing people off.
Which is exactly what I'm trying to do.
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Better off pressuring websites to dump flash.
While it would please me to no end for everyone to dump Flash in favor of HTML5+SVG+SMIL/Javascript, the fact is that one or more pieces of software needs to be written to replace the Flash authoring tools. There are many SVG programs, but those don't do everything needed.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of their apps are still Carbon.
Snow Leopard isn't 100% 64-bit, despite Apple's claims. Front Row, iTunes, Grapher, and DVD Player are all still 32-bit apps. That's because they are written in C++/Carbon instead of ObjC/Cocoa. Apple has had how long to rewrite them?
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
There need to be replacement development tools. There are many complex Flash animations which are worth watching, but the people who author them are not programmers, and they shouldn't need to be. I know there are SVG authoring tools, but do they work with animation?
I want Flash dead as much as the next Slashdotter, but I'm not sure the development tools needed to replace Adobe's are there.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:3, Insightful)
The simple fact of the matter is Apple has more than one API that it documents will do video acceleration. Only the one released very recently actually works.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Flash sucks doesn't absolve Apple of the problems that are their fault.
If everything was "perfectly fine" why did Apple release a new API that actually works and why are all the third party players updating to use it?
Re:Let's kill Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time I see a commercial website that requires Flash, I'll call the vendor and explain why I can't use their website. Should help kill Flash once and for all.
The vendor collects internal stats and subscribes to Net Applications and other services.
He knows that you represent less than 1% of his target audience.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
Also you can argue developers have a bit of a right to be lazy, and cross with Apple. Apple thrust a lot of changes on them, and has changed their mind on various things a number of times (like the no 64-bit Carbon when it was originally promised). They were asking people to do a lot of extra work, and you can understand devs might get angry. Especially when there's MS who seems to bend over backwards to try and make things easy and compatible. Now they don't always succeed, nobody but a fanboy would call them perfect, but they do put forth a good effort. Their 64-bit setup was very much designed to provide easy compatibility. The APIs were extremely similar, etc. So a 64-bit port shouldn't be too much work (unless you did things like cast pointers to 32-bit ints or whatnot).
While I'm not saying Adboe is blameless here, you can't lay all the blame at their feet either. Apple has gone through a bunch of changes, starting with OS-X itself and including some major things like a total architecture switch. That generates a lot of extra work.
There's also the fact that Cocoa is all Objective-C. Doesn't matter if you like it or not, it is something developers are not nearly as familiar with. So there's relearning there, plus additional recoding. While cross platform ports will always take a good bit of recoding, if you are having to change languages that just makes it take all the more. So I can understand why they'd want to stick with C++ and Cocoa since that would make it less work in terms of porting with Windows.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really pretty simple: Adobe doesn't want to make the investment necessary to make the Flash player efficient, stable, secure, and bloat-free. On the other hand, they want to keep making money selling the Flash development tools.
Excuse me, but.... huh?
I'm going to assume you haven't actually researched this (i.e. "I went to the source and got the full story for myself" research and not just "I read a Slashdot comment once and got angry" research) and are just running at the mouth because you're angry, not because you're right.
Which you aren't.
Here, let me introduce you to a guy. His name is Tinic Uro, and he's one of the people who actually programs Flash. He's an engineer like us, not a marketing droid (or worse, an executive).
Here are three blog entries you should fully familiarise yourself with before making any further comment on what Adobe is doing in terms of improving Flash on OS X.
Flash 10.1 and Core Animation:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=81 [kaourantin.net]
(TL;DR: yes, Flash 10.1 uses Core Animation to accelerate overall Flash graphics performance -- not video specifically -- but you need OS X Snow Leopard and a super-new version of Safari)
Flash 10.1 and timing:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82 [kaourantin.net]
i>(TL;DR: They rebuilt the timer model in Flash 10.1 to use significantly less memory, however Safari on OS X is less flexible than other browsers when it comes to firing timer events, thus making video playback less smooth)
H.264 hardware acceleration in OS X:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89 [kaourantin.net]
(TL;DR: Adobe has released a post-10.1 beta version of Flash that supports full and proper video H.264 acceleration on Mac OS X, with the caveat that you have to have 10.6.3 and certain current graphics chips)
The real story is this:
Apple has been well behind Microsoft Windows when it comes to providing third parties with APIs to do hardware acceleration, and to do high-performing timer operations that are necessary to run browser plugins smoothly. I know the Slashdotterie will get all worked up over that assertion, but speaking as someone who's actually written browser plugin code, you'll just have to trust me on this. IE has always had the best timer support, which is one reason why video- or timeline-heavy plugins have always performed better than other platforms. As of OS X 10.6.3 and Safari 5, Apple has pretty much caught up.
- Despite the headline-grabbing statements from Steve Jobs and other executive-types, there are actual hard-working developers at Apple and Adobe who actually collaborated to define a good API for high-performance video access for browser plugins. If Apple wasn't so deliriously secretive, you'd hear a lot more about it. Trouble is.... the only people who are allowed to blog at Apple are people who'll make the company look good and forward-thinking -- like the Webkit team.
The problem with performance isn't 100% Adobe's fault. It can't be. Adobe's engineers aren't stupid -- if there had been an easy solution to good plugin video performance on the Mac all this time, they would've fixed it years ago. Why spend several years intentionally using a bad approach?
Lastly.... despite what the article summary says here on Slashdot, overall Flash performance is quite a bit better in 10.1, especially on OS X. Do your own benchmarking; you'll see for yourself. It's still not as good as it should be, but it's a massive step forward. They know HTML5 is coming... they know they have to make Flash as good as or better than HTML5 or they'll be toast by 2020. They know all this.
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:!News (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it, Adobe is taking a cue from Sony and trying to supplant a perfectly usable and cost-effective technology (e.g. HTML, CD-Audio, HD-DVD) with a perfectly moronic proprietary cost-prohibitive overlicensed substitute (e.g. PDF, MiniDisc, BluRay).
They probably figured Acrobat would replace Internet Explorer at some point, you know, because HTML sucks in their mind. Why else would they embed code and video into something that started life as a (shudder) "Portable Document Format" ? The whole point of PDF was to have a faithful, device-independent representation of a print-ready document - PostScript to go! How they fucked it up is just classic Adobe narcissism.
Re:Apple Incompetence (Score:3, Insightful)
Your argument also doesn't account for Perian, which is most certainly OSX only and not cross platform. Perian is a Quicktime plug-in and very much tied to Apple's APIs. Feed H.264 out of a MOV file to the Quicktime decoder and it will enable hardware acceleration. Feed that EXACT SAME STREAM, except out of a MKV or AVI through Perian to the EXACT SAME DECODER in Quicktime and hardware acceleration gets disabled because Perian is not "blessed" by Apple.
A brief recap (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1998, Apple released QuickTime 3.0. They added a new feature since 2.0, building on RealNetworks' innovations in this area: pop up nag messages informing the software industry that Apple wasn't concerned about the consumer experience of QuickTime anymore. In 2002, Macromedia incorporated video support into Flash, and became web video leader by default.
Re:The new API is unusable (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what I never understood. Adobe makes a *huge fuss* trying to distract people with the hardware acceleration requirement, but other third party software on Mac has been getting along just fine without it.
There's no good reason that XBMC can play the HD streams from BBC iPlayer on my Mac with no issues and low/medium CPU use while the flash plugin itself is hitting the stops with max CPU use, and dropped frames. They are both pulling the same source down from the server. What makes XBMC so much better? It's not even like the Mac version of XBMC is their primary platform! I'm grateful there are Mac builds, of course, but their main focus is on the Linux version. (On a separate note, I am also saddened that the BBC added swf verification to their streams, breaking XBMC compatibility).
Adobe are just waving their hands and trying to distract from the fact that their Mac version of flash is really, really crappy because they just don't care, or they are stuck with legacy code... or who knows why? Even looking at pure software rendering of content (and not even video), there are marked differences between the Windows and the Mac version.
Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:3, Insightful)
Does your company's homepage have a flash animation or H.264 video? The acceleration is only for H.264 hardware decoding. There is no acceleration for use of adobe's proprietary animations.
Re:The new API is unusable (Score:5, Insightful)
Decades? Plural?
Kid, I assure you: If you were around computers 20 years ago, you'd have never made such a statement. Computer video in 1990 was anything but "perfectly fine," and none of the software you listed even existed at that time.
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:2, Insightful)
The penguin.swf blog is just an endless stream of excuses. Adobe absolutely can accelerate YUV->RGB. It's standard practice in software development to create a special fast path for a common scenario when performance matters. They can fall back to the slow path if the swf is trying to do something incompatible with the fast path.
Anyone writing a flash-based video player would opt for the fast path and follow whatever rules are necessary. But thanks to Adobe's laziness, that option isn't available. Flash is just a dinosaur that doesn't want to evolve.
FYI, here's how to accelerate video: Flash draws the scene in layers, back to front. For alpha blending or anti-aliasing of edges, it must read the RGB value below the layer currently being drawn to blend it with the current color. This is the problem, and there's a fairly simple solution. After rendering a YUV layer, render the layers above to an RGBA surface that starts out 100% transparent. Then send the output layers (RGB below video, YUV video, RGBA above video) to the video card for final compositing. The only scenario where this wouldn't work is if the player uses filters above the video. Have you ever seen a flash-based player that uses filters?
Re:!News (Score:1, Insightful)
PDF is open, anyone can implement it from the published documents. If you want documents published precisely, this is your best option, particularly if they need to be printable. HTML printing is and always has been pure garbage.
blu-ray existed by HD-DVD because HD storage solutions were needed. Toshiba and MS cut all the corners they could to give us DVD2, they failed.
Mini-disc was a digital recording format, you could not record onto CDs without a computer and appropriate software, let alone have a portable solution. There was little available at the time. DCC was a piece of shit and DAT was way too expensive for consumers. Mini-disc also flopped, mainly because it was too low quality in a world where CD quality was expected to be the minimum.
HTML standard? Not quite. Ask anyone with real web developer experience the number of inconsistent implementations they've had to work around, and bugs that are never fixed. Your gripe with PDF is one company's reader. Don't using it you don't like it, durrrr! Guess who invented the open post-script format, yes, the company you zealotry hate. Get over yourself.
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:1, Insightful)
Almost got IE Dead? Here are my Google Analytics from the past month, IE is still #1. Browsers without Flash represent a tiny fraction of the market.
Internet Explorer 1599
Firefox 521
Chrome 128
Safari 95
Mozilla 20
Opera 15
Opera Mini 4
SeaMonkey 4
BlackBerry9530 3
BlackBerry9630 3
Galeon 2
Nutexplore 2
BlackBerry9000 1
IE with Chrome Frame 1
Mozilla Compatible Agent 1
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, Acrobat is worse. Flash is insecure but it has to be very complex because of all the things you can do with it, so the insecurity is partially excusable. Acrobat, however, took the genius step of implementing javascript in a document format, something which 99.999% of PDFs don't need, but which 99.999% of malicious PDFs rely on. PDF should be a secure format, like .png and .txt are, but they just had to give documents the ability to run scripts on your machine.
Better experience? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a better experience without Flash installed. I believe this is true irrespective of OS.
Another great Adobe installation experience! (Score:3, Insightful)
So I download the .dmg and open it and run the installer.
The "Install" button's ghosted out until I click the "I have read and agree to the terms of the license agreement" checkbox. But where's the agreement? Well, there's a link (with no rollover state, of course) to this page on Adobe's site [adobe.com], with a bewilderingly-long list of links to EULAs. As PDFs.
Nobody ever reads the EULA anyway, but this is ridiculous.