Flash 10.1 = Kinda awesome.
Praising Flash is one of the last things I thought I’d ever do, but the latest version is looking to be the first that I actually want to install. This is mostly down the the addition of GPU H.264 decoding, meaning videos from places such as Youtube now play much more smoothly and as they are no longer running on the main processor, are no longer made to stutter when a background program starts using more than it’s fair share of CPU.
On my desktop, a 3.0GHz Pentium D with an nVidia 8600GT, I went from stuttering 720p video to smooth as silk 1080p video and no longer have to make sure nothing in the background is using up CPU cycles. I was watching Youtube trailers in HD while converting video using DamnVid and noticed no slow-down. When just watching Youtube in 1080p, total CPU usage remained around 30%.
All in all, excellent work by Adobe. I would like to see more of this put to use in other areas as well, mostly video conversion using something like DoubleTwist to let me easily move video between devices.
Also having this integrate into HTML5 Vid tags without the need for flash would be a bonus.
Download Flash 10.1 Beta 3 here.
