Adobe Flash 10.1
If you’ve visited many websites you will most certainly have come across Adobe Flash – whether you know it or not. This ubiquitous software plugin is used to drive many of the more visually appealing websites, as well as act as the ‘engine’ behind the video players used on websites such as YouTube and BBC iPlayer. It is in fact estimated that something like 70% of all video available online is produced on Flash.
Well, that would be understandable if Flash was outstanding at video playback… but the irony is that it can actually be quite slow! There are certainly many reasons why Flash is widely adopted, but performance of video playback can’t be one of them. Flash’s problem is that it relies upon the CPU to do all the decoding of the compressed video data. That’s fine if you have a PC with a pretty fast CPU in it – but if you haven’t, then you might find that video of a certain quality plays back poorly.
The biggest problem lies with video encoded using the H.264 CoDec (Coder/DeCoder). This is a highly compressed video format which has become increasingly used because of its usefulness in delivering High Definition video, with as little data as possible. It’s downside is that it relies on some quite hefty computing power to decode it in realtime at sufficient speed to deliver 25 or 30 frames per second smoothly.
Users of lower powered PCs, and netbooks especially, will therefore be glad to hear of the impending release of Flash version 10.1. Amongst a multitude of other improvements one of the most exciting is the utilisation by Adobe of the hardware decoding capabilities of many current graphics cards/chipsets, such as those made by AMD or nVidia. Many of these cards support h.264 decompression and can handle it much faster than many CPUs can. And the nice thing is, that a number of current netbooks for example use such chipsets – so with Flash 10.1 they can finally display 720p HD video (and perhaps even 1080p) which is produced with Flash, smoothly!
Flash 10.1 is still in Beta – but you can download a Beta version and try it out yourself (but be prepared for possible problems… you may wish to revert back to the standard version 10 if you do encounter them). Visit www.adobe.com and do a search on Flash 10.1.
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