H.264 Red Herrings April 30
DF, regarding hardware acceleration for Flash video:
clearly, [Adobe and Apple are] working together to make Flash perform better on Mac OS X.
True, perhaps, for some values of “working” and “better”.
Adobe’s attempt to excuse themselves for poor Flash performance on the Mac by arguing that Apple didn’t provide necessary hardware acceleration APIs was always a red herring. As noted by the Flash engineer in the linked article, hardware acceleration for H.264 video is only available on a subset of the Mac installed base:
- 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
Don’t get me wrong; hardware acceleration for video is where the future is, and it’s great to see Apple and Adobe making nice and making improvements in this area. But there are still a lot of pre-2009 Macs in the field, on which Flash video performance continues to lag far behind both QuickTime’s performance on the same video stream and Flash-for-Windows performance on the same CPU — they’re all being done in software. It’s cases like these which betray Adobe’s lack of concern for a quality user experience.