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Latest Flash Player streams HD video
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 6th December 2007
Adobe Flash Player Update 3 now decodes 1080p H.264 and reduces CPU usage for all.
The two biggest changes introduced in Update 3 are the inclusion of the H.264 video codec (as used by Apple's QuickTime video player) and support for the hardware acceleration features provided by modern graphics cards.
Previous versions of Flash relied entirely on software-based decoding and rendering which processed everything via the CPU: fine for a simple animated banner, but not so good for full-screen 1080p streaming video. The new update should see CPU usage drop drastically when playing Flash content.
Adobe hasn't forgotten the sound side of things, with supported added for the High-Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio codec to ensure that streamed HD content sounds as good as it looks. Whether anyone here in the UK has an Internet connection fast enough to stream (in real-time, mark you) a full H.264 video with multichannel HE-AAC audio is another thing entirely – and even if your connection is fast enough, I can't imagine it taking too many feature-length films before running afoul of the dreaded Fair Use Policy.
In addition to the Windows flavour, Update 3 is available for Linux and finally introduces a proper full-screen mode, something that has been sadly lacking in the past. Still no news on a working 64-bit build, however.
You can download this latest release from Adobe's website, and Adobe has kindly created a page of sample HD content to test it out here.
How does the new player run on your systems? Can you see any performance improvement from the new hardware acceleration features? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (16)
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With Flash being used pretty much everywhere these days to easily distribute video, the new codecs are a fantastic addition. If only Apple could dump their terrible QuickTime format on their movie trailer site and just use this instead!
And i never got the HD quicktime trailers running on all my machines. But then again, it could be that my 'quicktime alternative' is doing weird stuff with HD
What?? You do know H.264 is like so much better then Xvid right?
<A88>
so it is, i was confused due to quicktime never streaming fast enough for the video to play, whereas stage6 is perfect, even on the highest quality videos
Nowhere near superior. Flash is cross platform.
<A88>
Performance when playing HD trailers is about the same as playing same-resolution trailers from Apple Trailers in Media Player Classic, which is remarkable considering how difficult HD is. Using MPC, my system (2.2 GHz Sempron, 7600gs) can completely handle 720 and can almost handle 1080, but it spends a lot of time at 100% CPU and drops quite a few frames in fast-paced portions. On the Flash trailers, 720 runs about the same (~50% CPU). I haven't tried 1080 yet because my internet connection just isn't up to the task tonight.
EDIT: The proper full-screen function is very nice, but the scaling it uses is terrible. I mean, it's probably good for low CPU usage, but it really doesn't look good. And considering that my computer can almost handle the videos, and it's nigh impossible to buy a new computer which is slower than mine, it seems like they should have used a bit better scaling.