It has been clear for some time that Adobe were working with the ARM and Intel community and would eventually acknowledge that there are components on many devices that can decode H.264 better than a CPU. The Menlow platform has always supported H.264 decoding in hardware but the YouTube experience has been extremely poor because Flash doesn’t known about DXVA (Direct X Video Acceleration.) The same applies to many smarphone platforms too. OMAP 3 for example (as seen on N900, Archos 5, Palm Pre) has the silicon dedicated to this process but it’s not used. The CPU is left struggling, draining battery and giving the user a very poor experience.
Adobe finally made the official announcement today that Flash 10.1 is coming…
Adobe Systems Incorporated today unveiled Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 software for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices, allowing content created using the Adobe Flash Platform to reach users wherever they are. A public developer beta of the browser-based runtime is expected to be available for Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. Public betas for Google® Android™ and Symbian® OS are expected to be available in early 2010. In addition, Adobe and RIM announced a joint collaboration to bring Flash Player to Blackberry® smartphones, and Google joined close to 50 other industry players in the Open Screen Project initiative.
Windows Mobile, Palm, Windows, Linux and Mac get the public beta first with Android and Symbian getting betas in 2010. As for full releases, expect the desktop to get it first with handset manufacturers and carriers feeding it in later in 2010. The iPhone platform isn’t mentioned in the release so maybe Apple will double their efforts on HTML 5 and native video support.
You can bet that GPU-accelerated flash will be included in Moblin 2.1 in 2010 for the Pineview and Moorestown platform but Intel do lose a big advantage when the smartphone platforms get the same software. After that point it’s all about design and software.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
New article: Flash 10.1 and smooth online video coming to…everything? http://cli.gs/W3n8L
October 5th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Does this mean flawless HD youtube, even on an intel GMA500 based eking i1 since it supports DXVA?
Chippy Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am
In theory, yes, but probably only under Windows 7.
October 6th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Sokonomi i doubt it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pee3nT4bPw4
October 6th, 2009 at 11:44 am
There’s not so many devices with h264 encoding . I think that the gma500 will be supported. Even the opensource coders do not forget about gma500 and latest MPC HC has a hardware support using internal codecs without need of using the cyberlink codecs.