If you haven't done so already, please vote for VA-API implementation with Adobe's Flash over here: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-3146

The conversation has drifted, but I (Leroy) believe that I have pulled it back in.

Rgb has another bug report about Flash using too much CPU, and while I agree with his principals (yes, that should be fixed first), I don't expect the developers to take the time to rewrite the whole application from scratch. I do expect them, however, to output their video to an accelerated API such as VA-API.

I think that VA-API is the best solution for Flash video acceleration, and if you agree then please post over at the bug report (feature request) thread that I mentioned earlier. Hopefully, we can, at least, get Adobe's attention.

Adobe skunks Linux and OSX yet again-

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/10/226251/Adobe-Goes-To-Flash-101-Forgoes-Security-Fix-For-10?art_pos=3

'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."



No more 64-bit Linux version:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html [adobe.com]

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.


by Per Wigren (5315) writes: on Thursday June 10, @08:16PM (#32530404) Homepage
Linux has VA-API [freedesktop.org], the one true standard for hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux. Adobe should just use that and not struggle with the various proprietary vendor-specific APIs (VDPAU, XvBA, etc).

if you haven't done so already, please vote for va-api implementation with adobe's flash over here: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/fp-3146

the conversation has drifted, but i (leroy) believe that i have pulled it back in.

Rgb has another bug report about flash using too much cpu, and while i agree with his principals (yes, that should be fixed first), i don't expect the developers to take the time to rewrite the whole application from scratch. I do expect them, however, to output their video to an accelerated api such as va-api.

I think that va-api is the best solution for flash video acceleration, and if you agree then please post over at the bug report (feature request) thread that i mentioned earlier. Hopefully, we can, at least, get adobe's attention.

+1

Well, I don't know how many of you witnessed motd2k BITCH-SLAPPING VDPAU support into XBMC, but it was truly a sight to behold. I swear to God that this guy was farting out code in his sleep. He brought it, and he brought it on hard. It was fully implemented in the next stable release of XBMC which was less than a month away. If I could afford to fly to England and hug him, I would so totally do that.

Since Flash is a closed-source project, then we can't expect this kind of love from them. All we can do is beg the developers to see things our way and possibly change things.

Since this is our only recourse, I implore you to join me in petitioning Adobe to use VA-API with its Flash plugin: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/fp-3146

I think it is a waste of time trying to convince closed source developers to implement a feature in their software due to their limited resources.

As this section of the forum is based on open source, i.e. Linux, why not try convincing the developers of the open source alternative version of flash to implement VA-API???

I am assuming that the open source alternative to flash has more developers worldwide, so the implementation of VA-API into it should be faster???

Looks like it's already been implemented!

Check out this link:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzU1MA

Apparently the open source alternative to adobe flash a.k.a gnash have implemented support for av-api in their open source player.

...video playback performance has improved significantly thanks to this VA-API support and with 1080p clips it's working out much better than Adobe's own proprietary Flash 10 player for Linux.

Has anyone tried this out yet? Can anyone confirm if this is true?

Here is a link to the project:
http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/gnash-vaapi/

gnash doesn't work with hulu, though, or many other common sites: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Website_Compatibility

(although some of this may have changed since oct 09 when that list was last updated)

I wasn't certain this made it in to the main release anyway.. I thought there were questions about whether it was OSS, etc etc and it got pulled back (which seemed like a huge shame)

gnash doesn't work with hulu, though, or many other common sites: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Website_Compatibility

Isn't this because sites like Hulu implement proprietary encoding techniques into their videos and players to protect against theft of content? I don't expect to see open-sourced solutions be able to play most proprietary content anytime soon, if ever.

How well does gnash handle RTMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol)-encoded materials? How about mplayer? rtmpdump (http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/) is one approach, but not one that ordinary users will ever adopt, even when wrapped by decent tools like get-flash-videos (http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/).

Moonlight has similar problems as far as I can tell. I couldn't use it to watch the NCAA basketball tournament last March; I had to run Windows with authentic Silverlight.

Personally, I don't see HTML5 being a solution to this either. Commercial content producers are always going to demand that streams use DRM technologies that will thwart open-source players. (Well, players designed to work in places like the US at least.)

Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away

Good /. discussion, with lots of reasons & support for the Death of Flash, i.e. the consensus there is that Flash *will* go away within 5 years, replaced by HTML5/CSS3/Javascript.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180776/Web_multimedia_6_reasons_why_Flash_isn_t_going_away

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/08/17/1735256

re: the "Flash is needed for DRM's content" argument:

Counter argument (Score:5, Insightful)
by DrYak (748999) writes: on Tuesday August 17, @03:32PM (#33279792) Homepage
There are a couple of easily debunked arguments :


The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.

Exactly 1 single other platform : Android.
All the rest are only promises for some time in the future.

Meanwhile, HTML5 is an open standard meaning that everyone is free to implement it, including opensource implementations like Webkit and Gecko, and closed source like Opera's Presto and... huh... well... maybe IE's engine. Some day. Eventually.

But it's already available today on a huge number of platform and could be implemented on any new platform withouth needing to wait for Adobe to agree to port it.


Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.

You know what ? So are HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript.


Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers.

And is a total joke. RTMPE doesn't even use a secret to encrypt the streams, only some publicly available data and scrambling. Read about it in the Analysis [lkcl.net] section of RTMPdump [lkcl.net]'s docs.

Even a HTTPS server serving the data stream for the VIDEO HTML5 tag could provide better protection, simply because at least non logged-in users can't get the content.


Flash remains popular with online advertisers.

Sorry ? And that's a good argument how ?

So the only good arguments in favor of Flash are :
- Video codec patents problems (and that's about to change as the "as much close to H264 as possible but with the patented bit left out" WebM format has been introduced by On2 and Google)
- Good tool suite to develop (and that's a really good argument, but could one day change if better tool for HTML5/CSS/Javascript are developed)
That's probably the single only good argument in favour of flash. If developer and artist are given nice tools they will produce content. Flash has the nicest tools, so for now, Flash is preferred by the people who create the content and thus more Flash content is created.

Flash On Android Is 'Shockingly Bad'

http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/09/02/2159237

"Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. 'While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset,' writes Lawler. 'All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.'"

'All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad'

Having the option is still better than not having it.

Apart from that I don't know why anyone expected flash to work great on any current ARM based device given that even more powerful single core Atom netbooks struggle with it.

OT, but speaking of Apple, the new iPod touch and Nano devices are pretty impressive.

OT, but speaking of Apple, the new iPod touch and Nano devices are pretty impressive.

I'd never buy a media player that requires special software to upload songs to it, regardless how impressive the device is.
Media players should simply make their storage space available as USB mass storage device, and many media players and even mobile phones do just that. It makes it much easier to transfer files to or from them.

Anyway this is OT here.

Updated my prior post with article/discussion link.

I asked for this thread to be un-stickied, as I don't think there is anything more meaningful to add to the Flash on Linux issue.

Bottom line- we all know it has poor performance and only Adobe can fix it.

Flash is THE poster child for all that is wrong with proprietary, closed binaries vs FOSS solutions.

One company having this much power over internet content and your computer is just plain WRONG.

We need to make room in the sticky thread area for other more useful threads where meaningful FOSS work (and proprietary tools work) is being done daily that work on Linux and improve steadily, like the BluRay on Linux issue. I asked for the Official BluRay on Linux thread to be made sticky.

Having the option is still better than not having it.

Apart from that I don't know why anyone expected flash to work great on any current ARM based device given that even more powerful single core Atom netbooks struggle with it.

Off tangent for mobile devices, but...

Watching Flash video would be nice.. but even if that doesn't work well.. it strikes me that being able to surf websites that require flash for navigation would still be a big plus.