Why is Flash video so slow?!

Filed under: TechNotes — lars @ 07:40:51 am

The web is littered with complaints about the performance of Flash video.  I've never understood why, with fast video hardware providing acceleration for all sorts of video operations, the Flash player as used by YouTube and thousands of other websites manages to be much less efficient than a stand-alone video player.  In many cases, low end PC's that have no problem playing a video in something like VLC won't be able to play the same video using the Flash player without stuttering and dropping frames.

Flash 10 appears to have some GPU acceleration, but this appears focussed on making full-screen video as faster, not at improving the speed of standard-sized videos.  I've seen nothing official on why this is - it apparently involves issues around decoding RGB/YUV, supporting transparency and overlays, and probably many other obscure things.  However, in this age of netbooks and good enough computing , I hope Adobe, in their quest to become the dominant platform for interactive digital media, will have the vision to resolve this problem.

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