Adobe Goes To Flash 10.1, Forgoes Security Fix For 10

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."

New Apple API?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Apple published a new API in the latest Snow Leopard.

Re:Apple provided APIs

[abhi_beckert]

I'm sure the developers of VLC, Mplayer, Perrian and the like would have loved to use QTKit and CoreAnimation like you suggest. But they can't because those APIs simply do not work.

What *you* don't get, is that VLC, Mplayer, Perrian, etc have all been able to play video perfectly fine for years. It's only adobe that can't get their act together.

Personally, i don't give a flying fuck whether or not my video is hardware accelerated. As long as the framerates are smooth I'm happy. Everyone else can do it, why not adobe?

Re:Apple provided APIs

[MostAwesomeDude]

Is there any reason why Adobe hasn't been talking openly with the Mesa developers about OpenGL compatibility issues and glitches? Hardware acceleration is slower than CPU rendering and much glitchier, on the chipsets I've tested, and it'd be nice if there were even a half-hearted attempt to talk to us about it.

Re:!News

[thegarbz]

From a security standpoint it's a horrible idea. But yet it is a vision of the future. People want computers to do everything in one go. I haven't ever seen a futuristic movie depiction of someone waiting for a loading screen. No they just send an email, or do a video call as if by magic like no other applications have existed.

As someone who has seen a legitimate use of the 3D PDF features (a drafter sent me proposed changes to piping as a model embedded in a PDF file) I was in awe. Here was the text, a complete explanation, and not only a full isometric drawing of what was changing but a bloody model of the pipework! Forms are notes are some of the less impressive features I've used, but it would be awesome in our new utopian future where the entire world can run inside a PDF container. Acrobat will be the new operating system.

Re:Idiot

[gig]

The MSNBC Countdown site is a great comparison of what Flash costs in inefficiency. On a notebook it is Flash, but on iPad it is HTML5. The Flash site runs the fan on my MacBook Air and uses battery such that it would last for 2 hours. (Typically it gets 5.) On iPad, the HTML5 site runs cool and uses battery such that it would last for over 10 hours. The video also looks better on iPad, and the scrolling works as you'd expect whereas the Flash version has choppy video and the scroller doesn't work unless you click on it. I know my GPU has an H.264 decoder and I think Apple has provided access just recently (but probably not early enough to get into FlashPlayer v10.1) but I prefer the HTML5 version's interactivity also. It's just better.

Ironically, Microsoft doesn't have an HTML5 browser yet and NBC was the one TV company that said it was sticking with Flash for now. But whoever did the HTML5 site did a nice job.

MSNBC Countdown
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_ [msn.com]

To see the HTML5 version on a notebook, spoof iPad's UA string with Safari's Develop menu. On iPad the scrollers are invisible.

Re:Apple provided APIs

[BikeHelmet]

VLC, Mplayer, Perrian, etc on OSX can play better than Flash, that is not the same thing as "perfectly fine". VLC and Mplayer a quite optimized so with a fast enough CPU they can grunt through playback without help. That doesn't mean it's working fine. Use VLC or Mplayer on Windows or Linux on the same hardware and the CPU use is drastically reduced because hardware acceleration works.

Playing 1080 video [bigbuckbunny.org] in Windows XP, my Phenom II X4 faces a staggering 6% CPU usage.

You are correct.

Re:The new API is unusable

[drinkypoo]

Before then, QuickTime, including QuickTime X, could render to multiple targets, including OpenGL textures and CoreAnimation layers. You can take an H.264 stream, send it through QuickTime, and then composite it using either OpenGL or CA.

What is your response to claims that you cannot use Quicktime's H.264 acceleration if you are not Apple [slashdot.org]?

But, really, this is all misdirection. FFMPEG uses no hardware acceleration,

FFmpeg does use hardware acceleration. [ubuntuforums.org]

but manages to use about half of the CPU of Flash.

On which platform?