It's been a long wait since NVIDIA and Adobe
announced their plans for GPU-accelerated Flash video back in January of this year, but it looks like the pair now finally have something to show for themselves. While it's not quite clear how official it is just yet, the folks at
NotebookJournal have nonetheless published a video that shows 720p Flash video running smoothly on a netbook (an ION-powered
HP Mini 311, to be specific). Unfortunately, it looks like we'll still have to wait until sometime in the first half of 2010 to see the technology become publicly available (at least if the slides in the video are any indication), but you can now check out the demo for yourself after the break. Just be sure to stick with it for a while or skip ahead to the 1:20 mark -- they show a non-accelerated video at the beginning for an all too painful comparison.
[Via
Liliputing]
posted Sep 28th 2009 12:54PM
i hope 1080p can go smooth to by 2010 half of netbooks should have nvidia ion inside i hope my g4 imac can finally play youtube smoothly.
This was the only thing holding me back from getting an ION-system as HTPC
House and David,
You 2 are morons.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/20/iphone-3gs-totally-capable-of-1080p-video-playback/
Watch the iPhone stutter, skip, freeze, and altogether crash when trying to playback 1080p video.
WTF! 720p? Try an asrock 330 system for 1080p
http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Reviews/ASRock-330-Brings-Affordable-HDMI-1080P-XBMC-Solution.html
Man this video makes me wish they had decided to buy an LCD TV over a plasma TV, lol.
Flash 10 video is usually some variant of MPEG4 nowadays, and the high resolution videos are actually H.264.
The sad thing is that you actually can decode 720P H.264 video on an Atom (albeit only the higher clocked Atoms, and maybe with a bit of a decoding buffer to keep it smooth) but the Adobe flash decoder isn't very efficient at all.
So the problem isn't really with what the video was encoded as so much as with the fact that Flash has really terrible decoders for video right now.
I really wish they would improve the efficiency of the codec in general so that everyone could enjoy decent video playback instead of requiring a hardware decoder but I guess this is better than nothing.
Hopefully we will get that on the next iphone (iphone HD 2010)
The 3GS already has that. It plays back 720p perfectly, and 1080p plays smoothly albeit with audio problems.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/20/iphone-3gs-totally-capable-of-1080p-video-playback/
The only thing it lacks is a way to output the video in HD.
As has been said before, that article just proves that it can downgrade 720p video to HVGA and then play that. It's nice that it can do that, but there are far more impressive actual working demonstrations of HD playback on other handheld devices out there.
@ David Z: Read the article. It's talking specifically about FLASH video, not variants of MP4.
@DavidZ:
The iPhone doesn't even have flash support, dumbass.
Flash video includes MP4 as well. Flash10 fully supports H264 codec and MPEG4 specs.
I pointed out that the iPhone can play HD video, because I thought that the notable thing here was that the netbook could play any sort of HD video, not specifically Flash HD video... and I get called a moron, a dumbass and a troll? Grow up people, jesus.
David,
Theoretically ANYTHING can be made to play back 1080P video.
Hell, give me enough time and I could probably figure out a way to rig my Ti-89 calculator to playback 1080P video.
I hope you get the point Im trying to make, just because something "can", doesn't mean something "should".
In the case of the iPhone, it plays it back, but plays it back appallingly.
However, if you enjoy stuttering, skipping, freezing, and crashing, virtually every step of the way, then be my guest, play 1080P video on your iPhone...while I go rig my Ti-89 calculator to do the same.
Netbooks with discrete GPUs already can play HD because the codecs have GPU acceleration. Flash getting GPU accel is the new thing.
So, yes, the notable thing here IS SPECIFICALLY HD playback in flash.
So yes, you did miss the point.
I always wondered since these videos are in h.264 already when is Youtube going to start allowing us to stream those instead of using Flash.
Especially when we get HTML5 to everyone.
The Click2Flash plugin for Safari can do this, it will turn YouTube videos into a tag equivalent with the H264 version. It works and runs great.
They are actually working on that :). http://www.youtube.com/html5
what LCD flickers that horribly? it's like it's a CRT.
It's probably a plasma TV.
That's a common effect of filming any screen. Any single frame of the video camera takes less time than your eye does and doesn't do the smoothing your eyes do naturally, so every so often, a frame of the video lines up with a refresh of the screen you're filming. If you want to see evidence of it, point a webcam at your computer screen.
Seriously. It was hard to pay attention to the demonstration.
Huh.. Doesn't their Tegra chipset already do this? I know it has hardware flash acceleration and it can obviously play 720p video, so I'd assume it could do both together(since they're handled in separate cores)
Mark, take a deep breath and re-read the article. This is simply a software (Flash) upgrade in the works. They are bringing GPU acceleration to Flash video. At the moment, Flash video does not take advantage of your GPU, like true HD content should. Adobe has been working with Nvidia to make this happen, that is why you see their name in this article. It has nothing to do with new hardware.
Ah, didn't catch that. To be fair, it was only covertly hinted at in this article that it was a software and not a hardware upgrade.
Here's to hoping that a developer over at Adobe leaks the GPU acceletated version for us to play with.
Oh god. The normal releases of flash are buggy and crash prone enough. Can you imagine a beta flash build?
You can already do this in Linux, in fact, if you're willing to cope with the sharp edges yourself:
http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/gnash-vaapi/
Exactly what I was coming to say. Beat me to it.
Does this work with intels shitty chipsets or just the ION?
what are the chances of this being compatible with a crappy intel gma950? i dont even want hd just to be able to watch any flash video would be nice.
Simply beautiful!
hmm this was a long time coming...
figured since Adobe was able to implement GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS4, GPU acceleration for Flash should've come out soon after... guess i figured wrong.
Have you noticed how bloated and probably resource intensive those applications you just mentioned are. They should not be anywhere near that bad, but does answer the question what is taking them so long.
If Flash wasn't so slow they wouldn't need GPU acceleration.
Um...they would?
These netbooks can't play HD in any media player using just the CPU.
Yea, even the single core Atom processor is good enough to play 720p content. At least they're finally making an effort to allow the flash player to use the GPU.
any chance to fix the GMA 500 driver so z520 can playback 720p smoothly with it as well?
Since this concerns software rather than hardware.... Does this mean my Acer Aspire One netbook will have the ability to display movies of the quality they were showing with that little HP mini?
(Disregarding the crappy plasma screen, of course. ;P )
'GPU accelerated' makes me think of hardware though. Can anyone explain this?
And still another thing, It doesn't mean squat if the technology isn't free.... I'll stick to regular crud frame rates if that's the case.
This is specifically for NVIDIA GPUs. It wouldn't be impossible for Intel to implement something similar for some of their GPUs, but the GMA950 (which is the core of the GPU in your Acer netbook) has no support for hardware-accelerated H264 decoding.
basically this is how it'll work:
For ION netbooks:
- ION netbooks can play 720p videos in h.264 using a media player such as VLC since the GPU helps decode the video
- ION netbooks can't play 720p videos in Flash because Flash only uses the CPU to decode the video, the GPU is unused
After this update:
- ION netbooks can now play 720p videos in Flash because the GPU can now help decode the video
However for non-ION netbooks:
- non-ION netbooks can't play 720p videos in h.264 using a media player b/c even though the GPU helps decode the video, the GPU can't handle it
After this update:
- non-ION netbooks still can't play 720p videos in Flash even thought the GPU is now helping because the GPU wasn't powerful enough in the first place
finally something useful
Does this mean a MacBook Pro will finally play a Flash video without the fans going up to 6000 RPM?
No, Flash for Mac will still be horribly coded, which is why Apple tries it's hardest not to use it in any of its websites.
+1 for "why does Adobe Flash still suck on a Mac". After all these years you'd have thought that they could have sorted out the performance problems but it is still less taxing to watch a full 1080p QuickTime video than it is to watch a crappy YouTube video. Unbelievable.
Didn't know Harry Potter was even *released* yet.
I vote that all new cameras with video function be locked until the user goes through a basic set of instructions teaching them how to use manual focus/macro where applicable. I'm so tired of watching out of focus/focus-hunting videos.
Duh, if the darn video was not put into freakin' Flash, it would play much better without all the hokey pokey. But no, every twat under the sun MUST distribute in Flash. *flush*
I know it's not very popular right now but the latest silverlight has support for acceleration.
720p content on the web? Wow.. that's never been done before! Oh wait.. Silverlight does 1080p, d'oh!
The point: it's what you missed entirely.
He didn't phrase it very eloquently or diplomatically, but he's not entirely wrong. Microsoft really one-upped Adobe with Silverlight on the video front. The seamless handling of baudrate switching alone is something I haven't seen Flash do.
What's interesting is that silverlight's been doing this for a long time
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/sep09/09-08HTTPVideoPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases
I wish Hulu and other video distribution sites would at least have it as an alternative for users to TRY
Yeah, you missed the point just like DarkLord up there. It's not about sending out an HD video stream, it's about the ability of the user's computer to decode the content smoothly.
Up until now, GPUs weren't able to assist in playing back Flash (or Silverlight, for that matter) content. The whole load was on the CPU, causing netbooks and older computers to have a hard time playing back high-quality and HD Flash videos.
Perhaps you missed the point TJ? silverlight 3 has GPU video acceleration, it uses dx on windows and opengl everywhere else.. it only got announced god.. what, 6 months+ ago?
yup! sorry perhaps I linked the wrong article. here you go!
http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/09/silverlight-3-out-of-beta-joins-forces-with-your-gpu-for-hd-str/
Aah, I see. Good to know.
You were right, I was wrong.
You can already do this on OS X Snow Leopard for H264 flash videos with ClickToFlash which uses Quicktime X for GPU accelerated H264 decode.
did apple pay users to post about their products in every thread?
p.s. flash porn , finally!
No - we just have a long-standing hatred of Adobe and their complete inability to deliver a Flash solution for the Macintosh platform. There is a reason why the iPhone doesn't have Flash and the Macintosh version of the Adobe Flash Player is the reason. It is such an immense resource hog (watching a YouTube video? Well, you can kiss goodbye to 120% of processors on a 2.33GHz C2D MacBook Pro) that if you put it on an iPhone then the thing would just melt.
I'll wait to see what a 32nm shrink does to increase performance in a netbook.
What is the point when Flash player will mainly push H.264 playback.
Good, cause watching Kahlan's breasts in Legend of the Seek in SD on Hulu is not cutting it.
Fecking finally. Flash is a CPU hog on even fast computers.
now we only need stutter-free flash video on the mac and all is well..
Awesomeness!!
Adobe should run a beta test program. I'd really like to try this out and see how it compares to Silverlight.
Uh, nVidia should just ditch Atom and turn Ion into a full cgpu. Atom by itself currently seems pretty much useless in multimedia environment.
You can find the Live Demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW_39iecav0
The old video has been deleted ;(