HW accelerated H.264 video
in Flash Player 10.1

November 17th, 2009

Yeeea! I don’t know whether for you, but for me it’s Christmas today!!!

Finally you can go and grab Flash Player 10.1 Beta and AIR 2.0 Beta on Adobe Labs.

Flash Player 10.1 enables harware accelerated decoding of H.264 videos on Windows and series of mobile devices and netbooks.

There are numerous pros of this:
- less CPU usage
- better UX: Flash Player performance is better and the overall behavior and controls of a video player are faster
- less dropped frames
- watch HD videos even on Netbooks
- watch more HD videos at the same time…

So how much is the performace better. It’s variable in many cases. There is no official document currently saying this. However independent source (Engadget.com) tested it and here are the first results:

Read more here Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 beta GPU acceleration tested, documented

I am sure more tests are going to pop-up soon, so you will be able to compare more of them in different cases (like bandwidth, encoding properties, size, etc.).

Which graphic cards are supported?
Please refer to release notes of Flash Player 10.1.

It’s also important for us to gather bugs you experience with Beta versions. In such a case, please follow these reporting instructions (1.6 MB PDF).

Where to go from here
- Great article about HW acceleration of video and graphics in Flash Player 10.1 on Adobe DEVNET
- download Flash Player 10.1
- download AIR 2.0

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