Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1, But Hardware Acceleration on OS X Not Supported
Adobe today released Flash Player 10.1, the public version of its browser plug-in that has been available for testing in prerelease form since mid-November. The release, however, does not yet include hardware-accelerated decoding on Mac OS X.
Apple altered its policies in late March to allow third parties such as Adobe to tap into the hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 video on machines with compatible video cards. Adobe did just that a month later, introducing its "Gala" prerelease version of Flash Player 10.1 for Macs running Mac OS X 10.6.3 and using NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M video cards. The Gala functionality, highly anticipated by many users for its ability to free system resources and reduce loads, will be included in a future update to Flash Player 10.1.
Will Gala be generally available with the general availability of Flash Player 10.1 in the first half of this year?
It is expected that the Gala functionality - H.264 hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3 - will be available in an update following the release of Flash Player 10.1.
Flash Player 10.1 is intended to integrate the Flash experience across a broad variety of platforms, including smartphones, with support for multi-touch and accelerometer controls. The so-called "Open Screen Project" is consortium of nearly 50 companies looking to bring a consistent Flash experience across all platforms, but Apple is notably absent from the group.
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22 months ago
I installed it and tried using Zynga Poker on Facebook and got tons of artifacts... just me?
22 months ago
The release, however, does not yet include hardware-accelerated decoding on Mac OS X.
Like we didn't see that coming...Why not just say: "Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1, But OSX Version Still Sucks"
22 months ago
so it will still be a resource hog...
why even bother installing it until it supports hardware acceleration?
why even bother installing it until it supports hardware acceleration?
22 months ago
Will Gala be generally available with the general availability of Flash Player 10.1 in the first half of this year?
"...generally available with the general availablilty..."??????????
(Forget the coding complaints. That's been done to death. Here's something new to dislike about Adobe :) )
22 months ago
Actually, thanks for pointing out the lack of HW acceleration - I might have gone ahead and installed it...
I've been using "Gala" since it was made available, and Flash (video at least) is entirely tolerable. 720p doesn't even bother the MBP, CPU usage is minimal.
Crashes, on the other hand, are frequent. Very frequent. But I'm willing to overlook those given the performance increase.
I've been using "Gala" since it was made available, and Flash (video at least) is entirely tolerable. 720p doesn't even bother the MBP, CPU usage is minimal.
Crashes, on the other hand, are frequent. Very frequent. But I'm willing to overlook those given the performance increase.
22 months ago
This "hardware acceleration" is NOT supported on an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor?
I don't see it mentioned above, but it lives alongside the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M of my 15" Macbook Pro, so I'm asking for clarification ??
Thank you
I don't see it mentioned above, but it lives alongside the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M of my 15" Macbook Pro, so I'm asking for clarification ??
Thank you
22 months ago
Apple altered its policies in late March to allow third parties such as Adobe to tap into the hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 video on machines with compatible video cards. Adobe did just that a month later
That's not accurate to say. Third parties already had access to hardware H.264 decoding long before March, and the use of the H.264 dedicated API created in March is predicated on Cocoa. Flash Player did not become a Cocoa app until 10.1 (i.e., this very version), more than eight years after Apple warned of the deprecation of Carbon.To imply that the feature was missing until Apple allowed Adobe to add it is both false and misleading. Adobe could have taken advantage of it at any point had they updated Flash player sooner or had they used a native-code approach to playback by building on top of Quicktime (the API, not the player).
22 months ago
In general, even though I haven't gotten hardware decoding on my system (early 2008 MBP), the 10.1 betas have been more efficient than their predecessors, so a general release is still welcome. I'd still like to see Adobe make better versions of flash (or everyone just migrate to HTML5).
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