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Adobe Goes To Flash 10.1, Forgoes Security Fix For 10
An anonymous reader writes "The recent critical zero-day security flaw in Flash 10 may have fast-tracked the release of Flash 10.1 today. Adobe 10.1 boasts the much anticipated H.264 hardware acceleration. Except for Linux and Mac OS (PDF): 'Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. 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.' Your humble anonymous reporter, who is using Fedora Linux with a ATI IGP 340M, is very pleased that the developers of the OSS drivers have provided hardware acceleration for my GPU ('glxinfo : direct rendering: Yes,' 'OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R100 (RS200 4337) 20090101 NO-TCL DRI2'), but even if Adobe did provide hardware acceleration for H.264 on Linux, they wouldn't provide it for me because they disable it for GPUs with SGI in the Client vendor string. Adobe 10.1, with all its goodness, now gives me around 95% CPU usage as opposed to about 75% with the previous release. Good times. I anticipate my Windows friends will have a much better experience."
Apple has provided the API's to do the hardware decoding, and Adobe has a beta called Gala which has Mac OSX Hardware Acceleration enabled.. Adobe will have a release out soon that will incorporate the hardware decoding in OSX. My guess is Adobe had to fast-track the release of 10.1 to compensate for the wide open security holes they had lingering, and weren't prepared to merge the beta and the final release trees.
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 Linux thing might be true. Even if there was one universally implemented GL desktop standard, that's not the same as having a universally implemented hardware decoding API. They're pretty much orthogonal. As far as OS X, though, nothing changes the fact that Flash uses 3x as much CPU as VLC to render the same video. Spare me the apologist line of "Flash does more work than VLC!" - maybe that's their whole problem. You'd think something as widely used would have some optimized codepaths for the most common use case of playing Youtube videos.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Apple recently added an official API to access the H.264 decoding features of certain NVIDIA GPUs used in recent Macs. I'm sure Adobe was just rushing to get this out because of the zero-day.
Adobe will accelerate Flash video using new Apple API
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
No more 64-bit Linux version:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html
The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
"Direct rendering" != "Hardware acceleration".
Correct me if I'm wrong but:
- "Direct rendering" = decode the data directly to Video buffer. Otherwise the data needs to be decoded to a RAM buffer which then needs to be copied to the Video buffer to be actually displayed.
- "Hardware acceleration" = use the GPU for decoding (because a GPU is usually way faster than the CPU for this kind of work).
So you can have "direct rendering" without the "hardware acceleration" (and vice-versa though it's unlikely to happen in practice).
I thought Apple published a new API in the latest Snow Leopard.
They did. The summary is incorrect.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Apple recently provided a new low level API because of Adobe whining but they have had two APIs for H264 decoding for several years now. The problem with flash video is that they use a profile for H264 which is not supported by hardware decoders when they could have easily used the correctly profile. Adobe is the one that screwed up here.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Acceleration of H.264 is different than OpenGL acceleration. You can have a card with full GL acceleration that doesn't accelerate H.264 decoding. Indeed many older cards were like this. The original GeForce 8800s didn't have full H.264 acceleration, despite their massive amount of 3D hardware.
You have a separate API for that sort of thing, and near as I know Linux does not provide that. You could still implement it, of course, by implementing the lower level stuff needed to talk to the card in the correct way, but that is rather a lot of work and not really the place of a user mode app. Idea is the OS should provide the APIs/ABIs for that sort of thing. Driver makers then support it on the low end, apps plug in on the high end and it all works.
Have you considered using FOG, which is free, do to images and just rolling out new images when this sort of PITA software updates?
FOG also includes the ability to deploy installations without doing a reimage, just seems like a good time to do it.
If you don't like the 'Adobe Downloader', use this page:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/fp_distribution3.html
Apple's already working on it!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Give this a shot: http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player.exe
Who else would have to foresight to include embedded executable code and a javascript engine in a print document format?
It's even worse than that. Take a good look at version 1.7 of the PDF spec
From section 7.11.4.1 of chapter 13, which is titled "Multimedia Features"
And worse yet, quoting from one of the descriptions of flags in table 44:
In other words, you can ALSO embed the LIVE feed from your webcam in a PDF document.
The problem is those previous APIs don't actually work. Read through the VLC forums sometime on the problems they've had implementing acceleration on OSX, it's quite enlightening. Nothing that Apple hasn't blessed can use the old APIs and actually have the hardware acceleration work.
Now, Flash is a horribly programed pile of crap which is why it uses 3X the CPU of VLC to decode the same video on OSX. But neither of them are using hardware acceleration because it's impossible for a third party to do so on OSX, at least prior to this new API. Compare VLC on OSX to Windows or Linux on the same hardware. It still uses a massive amount more CPU on OSX than the others.
Here is the relevant tech note for the "Video Decode Acceleration Framework" on MacOS X: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2267.html
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And the version for IE: http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_ax.exe
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
For a start, Adobe could at least try and do YUV to RGB using OpenGL, that would help, but they wont do it. Little things like this Adobe refuse to do, it will only take someone a day to write the code, this will make your computer go from a leaf blower to a vacuum cleaner. *sigh*
XBMC has it integrated. 10.6.3 came out on March 29th. and XBMC had it a week later. Come on Adobe.
They also manage to have acceleration in linux with both VDPAU and VAAPI.
Why do we even need hardware accelerated h.264 decoding? My mac at work has it, and my ~6 year old mac at home doesn't have it. The only difference seems to be playing 1080p video.
For youtube quality... there's no reason to have hardware decoding except to conserve battery life. Adobe should be able to get 60 frames per second at low CPU usage on any processor released in the last 5 years, but they struggle even to achieve 20 frames per second at 100% cpu usage!
Adobe is the *only* video decoder with this problem. QuickTime, Windows Media Player, MPlayer, etc... they've all been decoding video perfectly fine for decades!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaAPI
Nvidia's wildly successful VDPAU implements VaAPI, as does:
-S3
-intel GMA500
-radeon UVD2
Adobe cant't do that, because Flash is not designed to play video. Think about it. Flash mixes MovieClips with vector and timeline content, all with z-axis alpha-blended content. It must transfer video into RGB in order to mix it with the bitmap data from vector sources, bitmap sources and from the font renderer. Flash can use sophisticated codec helpers for some tasks, but it will never be as good as dedicated devices like the iPad, which can only play one video format with specific limitations. This isn't to say that Flash is some kind of failure -- only that it was designed to solve a different problem.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
iPad does 720p. In fact, in some countries (including my own), Apple TVs and iPads are the only way to buy HD movies on iTunes. Funny, seeing as the iPad hasn't launched here yet.