Filed under: Video, Adobe, Web
Adobe release Flash Player 10.1 with GPU acceleration for HD video
This morning Adobe is launching a beta version of Flash Player 10.1 with support for hardware decoding of H.264 Flash video. In other words, if you have a supported graphics card (PDF link), you should be able to watch high definition and high quality Flash video without killing your CPU.
This comes as particularly good news for people who have picked up small laptops and nettops based on the NVIDIA ION platform. While the graphics processor is powerful enough to decode Blu-Ray video and play many modern video games, the ION chipset uses a low power Intel Atom processor that seems to think that 1080p Flash video would look better as a slideshow than a video.
With Flash Player 10.1 beta installed, even these ION-based machines can handle 1080p Flash video from sites like YouTube, which is good because YouTube is getting ready to roll out a whole heck of a lot more 1080P video.
You can download Flash Player 10.1 beta from Adobe Labs.
NVIDIA loaned me an ASRock ION 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics to test the new Flash Player, and it performed as advertised, easily handling 720p and 1080p HD video playback from Hulu and YouTube. The video at the top of this post shows the ASRock nettop playing video smoothly after installing the latest version of the software. To see what video playback looked like with the older version of Flash Player 10, check out the video after the break.
This comes as particularly good news for people who have picked up small laptops and nettops based on the NVIDIA ION platform. While the graphics processor is powerful enough to decode Blu-Ray video and play many modern video games, the ION chipset uses a low power Intel Atom processor that seems to think that 1080p Flash video would look better as a slideshow than a video.
With Flash Player 10.1 beta installed, even these ION-based machines can handle 1080p Flash video from sites like YouTube, which is good because YouTube is getting ready to roll out a whole heck of a lot more 1080P video.
You can download Flash Player 10.1 beta from Adobe Labs.
NVIDIA loaned me an ASRock ION 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics to test the new Flash Player, and it performed as advertised, easily handling 720p and 1080p HD video playback from Hulu and YouTube. The video at the top of this post shows the ASRock nettop playing video smoothly after installing the latest version of the software. To see what video playback looked like with the older version of Flash Player 10, check out the video after the break.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kris120890 said 8:31AM on 11-17-2009
Your videos don't work.
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Brad Linder said 8:33AM on 11-17-2009
Try again now. Someone decided to embargo this news until 9am this morning... and then lifted the embargo in the middle of the night leaving some of us a bit unprepared... you know, without naming names.
crankcaller said 9:43AM on 11-17-2009
"Linux and Mac OS X hardware-accelerated decoding is not supported in this version."
Great, just great....
I know it's coming at a later date but come on.
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HUPextreme said 11:57AM on 11-17-2009
hmmmm, made all my playback slightly pixelated. Ah well my quad core will have to do the work for now lol
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master811 said 3:48PM on 11-17-2009
FYI ATI are also bringing in Flash Video decoding, hopefully sooner rather than later.
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