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Adobe are quick supporting the H.264 Hardware Acceleration

Adobe are quick supporting the hardware h.264 acceleration in Flash Gala release http://bit.ly/aixK6s API only publicly documented last week.

On April 22nd, Apple published a tech note on some new H.264 decoding APIs and today Adobe announce that a beta version of Flash Player for OS X – the “Gala” version, calls those hardware APIs for decoding H.264 Flash. (Most “Flash Video” is h.264/MPEG-4 just like the video used for HTML5 and Apple devices, just that Flash is the player.)

That’s really walking the walk on Adobe’s part. Flash on OS X will likely suck less if you have one of the appropriate cards with H.264 hardware decoding on board.

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Philip

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2 responses to “Adobe are quick supporting the H.264 Hardware Acceleration”

  1. James Gardiner

    It is interesting to see how Adobe is at the complete mercy of the Apple TERMS on its technology.. Ie here Apple released documented API on hardware decoding. Meaning Adobe could then support it without Apple breaking it on them without causing a backlash..
    Tho, that does not stop them some times as the completely BOGUS change in iPhone/iPad terms show..

    Any developer knows the reasons given for this change in TEMRS for developing for the iPad/iPhone are bogus. There are NO grounds for that policy whatsoever. The grounds for that policy are squarely grounded in the fact that Adobe Flash Platform allows developers to develop once and put on ALL screens. Not just the iPad with its 30% tax.
    Flash is obviously a killer developer tool. (Apart from games, and yes, many games, but not all, should probably be tweaked per platform, but thats not what this is about.)
    This is about money, power and dominance, with the developer being the colateral fallout. Steve is Napoleon and the developer the foot soldier.. (Or cannon foder).

  2. Philip Hodgetts

    While picking up on the new hardware APIs will help video Playback, how will it help the processor load for a Flash plug-in doing nothing?

    As for the develop once and deploy many: times. On that I’m with Jobs. The Flash compiler did not give access to all the Cocoa Touch features and I think it’s reasonable for Apple/Jobs to say “no we want only apps on our platform that use the features of our platform”.

    Frankly cross-platform apps don’t work as well as platform-specific ones. Vegas is much more powerful as Windows only. Boris’ products (as powerful as they are) don’t take advantage of platform-specific features, nor do Adobe’s.

    And yes, HTML5/Javascript/CSS are open standards, not locked to a specific vendor, but the code for the Flash plug-in is proprietary and *is* the cause of most crashes on OS X. It’s the only thing that crashes Safari on my machine: no other plug-in does, but about 1 in 5 times I play Flash, the browser just disappears or locks up. Thank goodness for ClicktoFlash: without it the web is so horribly ugly and my browser takes a hit.

    As John Gruber said “who are you going to believe: the CEO of Adobe or our lying Activity Monitor”?

    BTW, QT is not supported on iPad, iPhone, iTouch. Only the MPEG4 playback of H.264 and AAC is actually supported. No other QT codecs are supported, no QT interactivity, filters, VR, etc are supported on any of the iDevices.

    Philip