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."
Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:2)
That's what they sound like, i.e., leaf blowers, when watching Flash video. It's welcome but Adobe/Macromedia should have done this *years* ago.
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:5, Informative)
For a start, Adobe could at least try and do YUV to RGB using OpenGL, that would help, but they wont do it. Little things like this Adobe refuse to do, it will only take someone a day to write the code, this will make your computer go from a leaf blower to a vacuum cleaner. *sigh*
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe cant't do that, because Flash is not designed to play video [adobe.com]. Think about it. Flash mixes MovieClips with vector and timeline content, all with z-axis alpha-blended content. It must transfer video into RGB in order to mix it with the bitmap data from vector sources, bitmap sources and from the font renderer. Flash can use sophisticated codec helpers for some tasks, but it will never be as good as dedicated devices like the iPad, which can only play one video format with specific limitations. This isn't to say that Flash is some kind of failure -- only that it was designed to solve a different problem.
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:5, Funny)
this will make your computer go from a leaf blower to a vacuum cleaner.
There's a Flash version for VAX?!
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Re:Laptops turning into leaf blowers going bye bye (Score:4, Funny)
this will make your computer go from a leaf blower to a vacuum cleaner. *sigh*
So my computer will now suck instead of blow?
Re:Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hardware acceleration can do wonderfull thing. Just make sure your laptop got one of the supported video card!
Re:Idiot (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Informative)
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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:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Informative)
Flash is a piece of crap, but lack of hardware acceleration on OSX is 100% Apple's fault, not Adobe's. Even if you hate Adobe/Flash this new API access is a good thing because VLC and the like now have working hardware acceleration as well.
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Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Apple provided APIs (Score:5, Informative)
For example:
- H.264 video in a Quicktime container played by an Apple player = Hardware acceleration enabled.
- The exact same H.264 stream repackaged in an non-Quicktime container (AVI, MKV etc) = Hardware acceleration disabled.
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.
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Are you saying that is documented (intentional) or just how it happens to be? If how it happens to be, maybe the developers are doing something that's causing them to not be hardware accelerated. Did they write up bugs with sample code showing the problems?
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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, Informative)
Still that misses the point. The so-called acceleration APIs are supposed to work outside of Quicktime too. Yet they don't. VLC has tried to use the official APIs and they just don't work. It's not a simple as calling the Quicktime code paths or not. Even basic things like video overlays don't work with the old APIs on OSX.
If the old APIs worked then why did Apple just release a "new" API that does?
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?
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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.
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The whole hardware decoding was just a red herring anyways. Adobe is using this as an excuse as to why Flash on OS X sucks. The real problem for Adobe was that they wrote their own codecs instead of using Apple's APIs all this time. By doing so, any Flash content on Macs would require 100% CPU rendering instead of allowing the OS to use any available hardware like the GPU. I think the problem was that Adobe didn't move to the Cocoa framework which has these APIs but instead stayed on the Carbon framewor
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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)
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See, I don't get it. I thought Adobe was begging Apple to get Flash on the iPhone. Why would they drop the ball on providing proper OS X support?
Yeah, that one's lost on me, too. "Come on, Apple! Let us play on the iPad! I know we've been unable to deliver a non-half-assed OS X version in a decade, but this time it'll be different! I promise!" Will I completely understand and sympathize with the argument against walled gardens, Adobe's done absolutely nothing to help their case.
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: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: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:Apple provided APIs (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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What bunch BS you are spreading. The Cocoa code migration problem is related to the desktop editing software like Photoshop and Illustrator. The Flash player code base is completely separate and have totally different issues. Most of them require changes in NPAPI and a lot of people at Adobe, Apple, Google and Opera are working on that as we speak. The other stupid comment you made about the codecs - how the hell you are supposed to call APIs that are not public? Apple just recently opened some of its inter
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: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)
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.
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If I look at my cpu while viewing my company's homepage which has a large flash animation, I get the following results on OS X (imac 27" 4x core i7).
10.0: around 150% (1.5 cores)
10.1: around 75-80%
So, while an improvement this hardware acceleration doesn't really change the fact that flash on the Mac still sucks. It shouldn't take 80% of your CPU just to view a webpage.
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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.
More like decelerated (Score:5, Informative)
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.
The Linux thing might be true. Even if there was one universally implemented GL desktop standard, that's not the same as having a universally implemented hardware decoding API. They're pretty much orthogonal. As far as OS X, though, nothing changes the fact that Flash uses 3x as much CPU as VLC to render the same video [flickr.com]. Spare me the apologist line of "Flash does more work than VLC!" - maybe that's their whole problem. You'd think something as widely used would have some optimized codepaths for the most common use case of playing Youtube videos.
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It seems linux has a standart API, but it's quite recent: It's called VDPAU
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Thats because flash isnt using hardware acceleration but VLC is.
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I don't think that's true. From my (admittedly limited) understanding, VLC is software-only. Either way, it's ludicrous that an open source project can get decent video performance while Adobe can't.
Re:More like decelerated (Score:5, Informative)
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Now, Flash is a horribly programed pile of crap which is why it uses 3X the CPU of VLC to decode the same video on OSX. But neither of them are using hardware acceleration because it's impossible for a third party to do so
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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
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It's Adobe fault for Apple's incompetence...
In much the same way that it's VLC's fault for Adobe's incompetence.
Apple recently added an official API to access (Score:5, Informative)
Apple recently added an official API to access the H.264 decoding features of certain NVIDIA GPUs used in recent Macs. I'm sure Adobe was just rushing to get this out because of the zero-day.
Adobe will accelerate Flash video using new Apple API [arstechnica.com]
So much for 64-bit (Score:5, Informative)
No more 64-bit Linux version:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html [adobe.com]
The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time.
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
He who speaks Latin is doomed to repeat it?
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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.
Re:So much for 64-bit (Score:4, Informative)
The old 10.0.45 version of it appears to still be downloadable from here [macromedia.com] (not sure if there was another version after that).
However, given the rate at which security issues crop up in Flash, you are probably better off using the nspluginwrapper thunking stuff or other method for your distro that makes the 32 bit plugin work on 64 bit Linux, rather than running an out of date Flash plugin.
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.
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Never heard of that one. Keyboard input always worked fine for me and plenty other people, though there was a problem with mouse input with a one-time workaround. I've been running 64-bit for a while now, but if Adobe is not fixing the security hole in the 64bit version, I guess I'll have to go back to nspluginwrapper. At least until YouTube reliably works in Firefox without Flash.
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.
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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.
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There are a fair number of us that have never needed Youtube, but would love to see an alternative for things like Hulu.
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.
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Apple's already working on it!
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On the fliip side of the coin, Flash ads get blocked implicitly.
No empty death: he died with his phone in hand (Score:2)
I suggest you make your funeral arrangements before calling all the vendors who require Flash.
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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: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.
That's good (Score:2, Insightful)
"Direct rendering" != "Hardware acceleration" (Score:5, Informative)
"Direct rendering" != "Hardware acceleration".
Correct me if I'm wrong but:
- "Direct rendering" = decode the data directly to Video buffer. Otherwise the data needs to be decoded to a RAM buffer which then needs to be copied to the Video buffer to be actually displayed.
- "Hardware acceleration" = use the GPU for decoding (because a GPU is usually way faster than the CPU for this kind of work).
So you can have "direct rendering" without the "hardware acceleration" (and vice-versa though it's unlikely to happen in practice).
Also (Score:5, Informative)
Acceleration of H.264 is different than OpenGL acceleration. You can have a card with full GL acceleration that doesn't accelerate H.264 decoding. Indeed many older cards were like this. The original GeForce 8800s didn't have full H.264 acceleration, despite their massive amount of 3D hardware.
You have a separate API for that sort of thing, and near as I know Linux does not provide that. You could still implement it, of course, by implementing the lower level stuff needed to talk to the card in the correct way, but that is rather a lot of work and not really the place of a user mode app. Idea is the OS should provide the APIs/ABIs for that sort of thing. Driver makers then support it on the low end, apps plug in on the high end and it all works.
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It does, VA-API or VDPAU.
Windows friends??!! (Score:5, Funny)
I anticipate my Windows friends will have a much better experience
PARIAH!! UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!
Download Links (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like the 'Adobe Downloader', use this page:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/fp_distribution3.html
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The next major release will be really loud. (Score:5, Funny)
Adobe Goes to Flash 10.1
"These go to eleven." [wikipedia.org]
SHENANIGANS! (Score:2, Funny)
No mac or linux HW support? I call Shenanigans on Adobe!
Can we get our brooms now?
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.
If only there were a "video accelleration API"... (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaAPI [wikipedia.org]
Nvidia's wildly successful VDPAU implements VaAPI, as does:
-S3
-intel GMA500
-radeon UVD2
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.
Re:!News (Score:4, Funny)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go look at a PDF that has pictures of someone's vacation emailed to me by an unknown perso
Re:!News (Score:5, Informative)
Who else would have to foresight to include embedded executable code and a javascript engine in a print document format?
It's even worse than that. Take a good look at version 1.7 of the PDF spec [adobe.com]
From section 7.11.4.1 of chapter 13, which is titled "Multimedia Features"
And worse yet, quoting from one of the descriptions of flags in table 44:
In other words, you can ALSO embed the LIVE feed from your webcam in a PDF document.
Re:!News (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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:well, of course. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Flash/Acrobat and even Java are a serious headache if you are small enough to not need or can afford an enterprise-level software management tool, yet big enough that patching machines individually can take quite sometime.
Does anyone know of a good (hopefully low-cost/free) central patch management software/tool for things like Flash?
I found ManageEngine's [manageengine.com] Desktop Central today (which is free for 25 or less machines), but I'd love to hear how other people are dealing with patching non-MS stuff.
Re:well, of course. (Score:4, Informative)
Have you considered using FOG, which is free, do to images and just rolling out new images when this sort of PITA software updates?
FOG also includes the ability to deploy installations without doing a reimage, just seems like a good time to do it.
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That looks like an interesting solution. By quickly scanning their site I'm not sure how would something like this work for patch management.
I'll take a closer look at its documentation later today, thanks for the lead :)
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They are called snapins and you can have them do pretty much whatever you need. In this case most likely you would want to make a snapin that did the install. Then you would deploy that to all the clients. Their user guide is quite good.
If you have questions feel free to email my gmail, same username.
Re:New Apple API? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought Apple published a new API in the latest Snow Leopard.
They did. The summary is incorrect.
Indeed Apple did (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the relevant tech note for the "Video Decode Acceleration Framework" on MacOS X: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2267.html [apple.com]
Re:New Apple API? (Score:5, Informative)
XBMC has it integrated. [xbmc.org] 10.6.3 came out on March 29th. [apple.com] and XBMC had it a week later. Come on Adobe.
They also manage to have acceleration in linux with both VDPAU [wikipedia.org] and VAAPI [builditsolar.com].
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Why do we even need hardware accelerated h.264 decoding? My mac at work has it, and my ~6 year old mac at home doesn't have it. The only difference seems to be playing 1080p video.
For youtube quality... there's no reason to have hardware decoding except to conserve battery life. Adobe should be able to get 60 frames per second at low CPU usage on any processor released in the last 5 years, but they struggle even to achieve 20 frames per second at 100% cpu usage!
Adobe is the *only* video decoder with this pr
Re: (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
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: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:The new API is unusable (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Direct Download? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Direct Download? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
not so.
VA-API and VDPAU are both available.
If gnash can do it so could flash.