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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

On Windows, Flash has tunnels to your video card to let its hugely parallel processors burst-decode a ton of information at a time. It can’t do that on OS X, from what I understand — mainly because Apple doesn’t want them to.

I can't believe this. VLC does not use 70% CPU to decode a 720p video, and it's not using any hardware acceleration other than an overlay. (Or maybe it renders to a texture; either way, it works fine even with a GMA950.)

It also appears that vidix supports OS X, which lets you actually offload video decoding to your nVidia card. (Edit: maybe I'm wrong, I was thinking of VDPAU, not vidix.)

So... I call "LIES" on this. Apple loves arbitrary restrictions, but OS X does not have many. You can make your GPU do whatever you want, even on Apple hardware.

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I found this linked from an old Hacker News article:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.

I didn't say Adobe wasn't lazy. mplayer can use the hardware acceleration of my nVidia card, so I don't see why Flash can't. It's just programming.

It's fine with me, though. I would like to see Adobe and Apple both die in a big PR fireball, and that looks to be where this is all leading anyway.

Flash 10.1 has been in public beta for less than 6 months, and only accelerates decoding on minority hardware. A few percent of their install base has it, tops. Flash on Windows decodes video at unaccelerated libavcodec speeds just fine without it.

They're pushing this angle because it makes them out to be the heroes -- see the passive-aggressive spiel you get when you visit the Flash page on an iPhone -- they'd love to frame everything as "if only Apple would let us". Unfortunately it's not true in the slightest.

Nobody's shipping a full Flash player for Android or WebOS because it doesn't exist. Maemo can use a standard desktop NSAPI plugin, but Nokia+Mozilla won't ship the one Adobe has compiled for them because it's too shitty. All of this has been "6 months away" for years now, going back to the Macromedia days.

I just went to youtube in the default browser on my Maemo phone. The flash plugin is installed, but Mozilla are ignoring it in the Firefox for Maemo because of all the crashes.

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