Adobe will accelerate Flash video using new Apple API
Adobe will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac.
Adobe is getting help from Apple to wring better performance from Flash Player in the form of the new Video Decode Acceleration Framework. Not all Mac users will see the benefits, but Adobe confirms it will roll support into an update to Flash 10.1.
Apple isn't giving any ground in its decision to keep Flash content off its mobile devices, and Adobe has made no effort to hide its displeasure with Apple's decision. Flash will continue to be available for the Mac for the foreseeable future, on the other hand, even though many users find its performance less than stellar. The lackluster performance may change, though: Apple recently added an official API to access the H.264 decoding features of certain NVIDIA GPUs used in recent Macs, and Adobe plans to use these APIs to improve Flash performance when playing back video content.
The war between Apple and Adobe became heated earlier this year when Steve Jobs reportedly dissed Flash as having poor performance and stability, both to Apple employees and to executives at the Wall Street Journal. Mac users are painfully familiar with the performance disparity of Flash between Mac OS X and Windows (and it's even worse on Linux). Adobe executives told Ars that one of the main causes of the performance disparity is that Mac OS X lacks comparable APIs that Adobe uses for Flash on Windows, including a way to access hardware-based H.264 video decoding.
In the recent Mac OS X 10.6.3 update, Apple added a Video Decode Acceleration Framework for accessing H.264 decoding hardware present in the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, 320M, and GT 330M GPUs. It turns out that this is precisely one of the APIs Adobe was hoping for.
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