Adobe Enables Mac Hardware-Accelerated Decoding in Updated Flash Player 10.1

As noted by project manager Thibault Imbert, Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 for Mac has been updated to enable hardware-accelerated decoding of video content, offering smoother playback, lower system resource usage, and longer battery life for portable devices.

We just pushed a few minutes ago a new version of the Flash Player 10.1.82.76 containing a nice feature that was in beta until now called "Gala". Yes, H.264 GPU decoding in Mac OSX is now officially enabled in the Flash Player.

You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature.

Adobe released Flash Player 10.1 in June, but did not include hardware acceleration for the Mac OS X platform in that release. Users willing to run a beta version of Flash Player have, however, been able to access the feature with a pair of "Gala" preview releases pushed out over the past several months.

According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is supported on the following models:

- MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
- Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
- MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
- iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

The new version of Flash Player is available through Adobe's download site.