It’s been a very long wait, but the release is finally here: Adobe has released Flash Player 10.1. Since Flash has come under increasing scrutiny, there’s a lot at stake here for Adobe. This release is supposed to use far less resources while still being faster, more stable, and more secure. Update: No 64bit Flash player for now – on any platform. The Linux beta has been axed.
Flash-fan or no (I’m not), there’s no denying Adobe has put an insane amount of work into this release. From experience I know that the work on improving performance across the board can be seen with the naked eye: processor load dropped significantly after installing the 10.1 betas and release candidates, so I’m hoping the same will apply to the final release.
The improvements in performance go hand-in-hand with work done to lessen the stress on battery life for laptops. For instance, when Flash content is running in the background on a non-visible browser tab, Flash 10.1 can reduce its load on the processor for that specific content. Memory usage has decreased across the board, and when memory does run low, Flash Player will automatically shut itself down to make way for other tasks.
Flash 10.1 also brings hardware accelerated playback of H264 content to Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Sadly, this feature, which decreases Flash’ processor load significantly, is not yet available on the Linux version, and the Mac OS X version won’t have it until some time after this release. This is the case because Apple didn’t expose the proper APIs until very recently. You can download the Gala test release which enables H264 hardware acceleration on Mac OS X.
Speaking of the Mac, Flash 10.1 brings a lot of Mac-specific improvements. Flash Player 10.1. is written entirely in Cocoa, and uses a Cocoa user interface for dialogs, Core Audio for sound, Core Graphics for printing, and Core Foundation for bundle-style text. Core Animation is used to speed up rendering performance, and on Mac OS X 10.6, hardware accelerated Core Animation is used.
There’s a whole lot more going on here, including multitouch support, so this is just a selection. You can download Flash 10.1 from the usual location.
Does this version of Flash support Vp8/WebM, or will that be arriving in a later version?
I welcome any improvements to it which reduce the number of resources that it uses up. I keep having to run “killall nspluginviewer” on my linux box to stop it from needlessly using up resources. I’d prefer not to have to worry about it than I do any other plugin.
Flash 10.0 will exit gracefully when hosted from a GTK1 (Linux) browser. Flash 10.1 crashes the browser. I keep multiple browsers (GTK1 Firefox 2 + GTK2 FireFox 3.6) so that I have a ‘stable’ browser to run that flash won’t touch and hence it won’t crash and misbehave.
Sigh. Now I’ll need to move the plugin into the browser dir (rather than home dir) to keep one browser flash-free.
It never ceases to amaze me how browsers can be solid (and big!) and the much smaller flash causes so much trouble. There’s definitely a quality gap between Adobe and the rest of the industry.
There might be a quality gap between linux distributions as well – I remember having to do the same manual copying, killing nspluginviewer, etc before (mainly on kubuntu). Since I’ve been on Arch linux, I never had a problem with flash. I use chromium now (6.0.420.0 (48484)) – didn’t have to do anything, flash worked automatically once I installed it. I also use Firefox from time to time, no problems there either. The only hurdle I had was initial setup, for I wanted flash not to block the sound system (hence I needed pulseaudio, then setting up a pulse enabled xine engine for KDE, and mplayer-pulse). But that was a one time job, I did it in October last year. Since then, I repeat, I never had a single problem with flash on either Firefox or Chromium.
Well, I also use Flash on Arch Linux. It has major problems. Often it just gets stuck on video playing because of sound issues. And after every suspend/resume it is almost certain I will have to kill my browser and restart it because Flash otherwise blocks Alsa…
But it’s good to know that at least one person on the planet can use Flash on Linux without any trouble.
Well, with Flash 10, I never got a crash on Ubuntu 9.04 and various releases of Pardus. My gripe with flash remains essentially the awful performance.
Installing the beta of 10.1 reduced stability but enhanced performance by far. However, now that 10.1 is released, I think that I’m screwed, as someone who does not use Deb nor Rpm…
Note that setting up the sound system was crucial to have a painless flash experience. I don’t particularly care for pulse-audio, but apparently you need it to have not only simultaneous playback but stability as well. It was a hassle, because then you need to have mplayer-pulse form aur as well, plus bin32-skype-pulse, libao-pulse (basically pulse versions of the major libraries). But you only have to do it ONCE!
That’s why I think that problems with flash on linux are not necessarily Adobe’s fault – it is possible to set up the system correctly. Unfortunately, very few distributions do it for you (I think mandriva was OK, but kubuntu wasn’t). Arch doesn’t set up anything for you (that’s why we love it
) but my experience shows that it is possible to do it without any extra patches and tinkering (arch is as vanilla as it can get) – just proper configuration.
Interesting. Everybody knows that Alsa sucks. Some people claim pulseaudio would suck even more.
I guess I have to go with the time then and install pulseaudio as you have outlined. Thank you for the pointers.
You’re welcome – I hope it works out for you! You need to set up a few things (/etc/asound.conf, add your user to pulse-access and pulse-rt groups, etc.) plus you’ll probably need to replace a few libs. On my system, this is what I have:
[molinari@Helios etc]$ pacman -Q | grep pulse
bin32-skype-pulse 0.1-1
lib32-pulseaudio 0.9.21-7
libao-pulse 1.0.0-1
mplayer-pulse 31347-1
pulseaudio 0.9.21-6
sdl-pulse 1.2.14-2
Although as I said there are no crashes, sometimes (very rarely) pulse breaks, and when you play a sound you hear a jingling/cackling noise instead. /etc/rc.d/pulseaudio restart solves this instantly. That’s the only problem I still couldn’t solve, but it doesn’t happen very often
Interesting. Everybody knows that Alsa sucks. Some people claim pulseaudio would suck even more.
ALSA is pretty basic and handles some things rather poorly. PulseAudio is just a rather shaky layer on top of another shaky layer so the result can’t obviously be top-notch. I know ALSA devs disagree with me, but I still think that most of the functionality that PulseAudio does should be at ALSA level instead.
Anyhow, I haven’t had much trouble with PulseAudio. Usually everything works fine. I just got a new server machine where PulseAudio for some reason refuses to acknowledge the presence of an audio card and thus refuses to play any sound. Had to disable PulseAudio to get working audio playback.
This happened for me with the 64-bit plugin, but not the 32-bit one.
And still no 64 bit player? Sigh.
32bit only folks. Nothing to see here.
I wonder about the Mac OS X version since Safari runs as 64-bit, though Firefox, Chrome, and Opera do not.
Are you sure about that?
Yes, since Snow Leopard Safari has been 64bit:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/06/12safari.html
I’m bringing a second confirmation. Yes, the system monitor says “Intel (64-bit)” for Safari.
Firefox is 64-bit on mac or is going to become so, according to Mozilla’s nightly build repository at :
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk…
…where I find this file :
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk…
Firefox and Chrome, and AFAIK Opera, all run 64-bit on 64-bit Linux systems.
64-bit Safari uses trickery to work with 32-bit plugins, so it’ll still work.
The 64-bit Firefox builds won’t, however, just like on Windows.
Safari uses a seperate process for the plugins, which then can run in 32bit.
i read somewhere that after this 10.1 release they’ll start focusing on 64bit builds.. even for Windows.. now how long can that take?
And Firefox nightlies have started to come with a 64 bit installer.. yummy..
still no FreeBSD, x86 or x64, version? *sigh*
Damn, where’s the Haiku version?
Right behind the version for Contiki 😛
Right behind the version for Contiki 😛 [/q]
hah! by the time R1 is final, Flash has faded to a niche market and you’ll be watching VP8 material on YouTube in WebPositive (actually you’ll be doing that way before R1 final and way before Flash fades
10.1 uses more CPU usage in my laptop than 10.0 in Youtube 1080p videos.
Maybe it brings out better video quality.
Nope. It is pretty much impossible to decode video and show a coherent picture unless you decode it perfectly. In most codecs, many frames are based on the frames before them. It’s simply not possible to improve the quality of a video decoder.
True, but you can use some filters to give a better look to the decoded video, as an example by smoothing up the Jpeg-like “block” encoding artifacts if some are detected…
the visual or perceived quality.
But yes, I think you are right.
Yeah, I’m seeing zero performance improvement. It still takes 100% CPU time to play a Youtube vid, and the playback is still choppy. And this is on a Core2 Duo. Pathetic.
Edited 2010-06-11 02:36 UTC
It’s Apple/OS X which are pathetic. They recently added a framework which would make it possible to play H.264 videos through the GPU in flash on macs, but they only did it for the latest Nvidia chipsets and GPUs so no luck even if you have an older Intel, Nvidia eventually the latest ATI GPUs they used even if they got H.264 support in the chip.
Blame Apple for total lameness, as always. I to hated flash on my mac, now it’s been resting on a shelf for 13 months, I should really be faster in mailing them but it’s so f–king disturbing.
Try it in Windows on the same machine and I’m sure things will improve ..
Edited 2010-06-11 03:48 UTC
Hardware acceleration for Flash on Linux is non-existent. I’ve got VDPAU for Mplayer using Nvidia for my H.264 very recently, so spare me the Jobs is late to the ball game crap.
I don’t have video players spanning multiple cores running OpenMP on Linux and seeing my cores barely being touched.
I’m seeing a single core still running VLC with Red Cliff II at 10% utilization.
Yet, if I have this in Flash it’ll throttle my CPU.
Sorry, but Flash is a pig.
You’re comparing a walled garden of apples to an open field of oranges.
Jobs is paid megabucks to provide above-average, bleeding-edge, psychedelic experience to his customers.
In the GNU/Linux development I don’t see this kind of commitment (and you see it from industry attitude to Linux versions)
That said, yes Flash is still bloatware.
I dunno, flash has been working very well on my linux laptop since the new betas. Below you can see me playing a 720p youtube video. My CPU utilization is 66%, but they are not throttled – running at 800Mhz only!They can go up to 2500Mhz (I’m using ondemand cpu governor).
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9y6k-s1Bj0aDHwCFqJdg6A?feat=di…
Flash version:
Name : flashplugin
Version : 10.0.45.2-1
URL : http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer
Licenses : custom
Groups : None
Provides : flashplayer
Depends On : mozilla-common libxt gtk2 nss curl
Optional Deps : None
Required By : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : flashplugin-beta
Installed Size : 11735.00 K
Packager : Giovanni Scafora <[email protected]>
Architecture : x86_64
Build Date : Fri 12 Feb 2010 04:21:50 AM ICT
Install Date : Sun 11 Apr 2010 02:53:34 PM ICT
Install Reason : Explicitly installed
Install Script : No
Description : Adobe Flash Player
H264 acceleration on osx IS a joke. It only supports the quicktime implementation (therefore practically anything encoded with x264 fails). VDPAU has been out for a fairly long time now and pretty much accelerates anything under the sun xvid,vc-1, and h264.
I imagine that is why video is still crappy (on osx) compared to something like vdpau.
Ummm, Flash has been horrible since before Macromedia had it.
If it’s Apple’s fault, why does Silverlight run so well?
I suspect Microsoft has internal undocumented APIs which it uses for making Silverlight run faster on windows.
Actually, uses a large but close to perfectly documented set of APIs which are native on windows and not on other platforms. It explains very simply why it runs faster.
.Net, WPF… All of this is loaded at bootup and optimized on Windows, since parts of the system use them…
Edited 2010-06-11 09:22 UTC
Except that we’re talking about Silverlight for Mac here, not the Windows version at all. Sl on the Mac actually performs well, even when Flash doesn’t. Perhaps try reading the entire thread first?
That’s nonsense, Flash is just a piece of crap. Flash operates on RGB data!
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/05/flash_uses_the_gpu.html
“Unfortunately, the Flash Player can not easily make use of this since Sorenson, On2, or H.264 video data — even though it is decoded as YUV — has to be converted to RGB and possibly combined with other graphical elements.”
Therefore it is slow like hell.
I’m guessing GP was talking about Silverlight on OS X which, although I’ve never used, I have heard it runs pretty well on OS X.
He’s talking about on OSX. Silverlight runs circles around Flash video on OSX. Without the overly heavy CPU usage.
On Mac OS X?
You really have to give Microsoft credit. (I never thought I’d see myself writing that.) They’ve done something for Mac OS X that’s positive.
What’s that axiom about the enemy of my enemy being my friend?
Edited 2010-06-11 16:07 UTC
Besides the undocumented APIs spoken of (MILCore) is just a light wrapper around DirectX to make it easier for WPF to talk to DX (And I’m not even sure if SL uses it at all, traditionally SL shuns some of the more obscure features like BAML, a compiled form of XAML. It actually just parses it really fast, which explains why SL apps are more sensitive to a heavy visual tree especially on startup perf.)
And things like .NET (In the Desktop sense) and the WPF font cache (which is optimized on startup) have nothing to do with Silverlight because SL doesnt actually use any of them. The Plugin itself is a reimplementation of the CLR.
So no, Silverlight just runs better than Flash. Period. On Windows, on OSX, on Windows Phone, on Symbian, and using Moonlight, on Linux.
To use these terms…
Faster, More Secure, Less Resources, More Stable
in reference to anything Flash related is retarded. It just ain’t so.
Well the CPU does have ‘Less Resources’ left over when running Flash. It is therefore, as you correctly point out, retarded.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+retarded&meta=
Seems to me like at least some of those terms are applicable then.
Yeah, and many of these are also bullet points on a lot of new versions of software, from anti virus packages to media players and everything in between. Problem is, how the hell does an end user quantify this, especially the more secure and more stable parts …
And here I am bucking the status quo with my positive experience with Flash 10.1. I’ve for Safari 5.0 installed and Flash 10.1 Final – everything is working nicely, for CPU utilisation it is jumping between 20-30% which is only marginally worse than Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Flash 10.1 which is jumping between 17-28% even with hardware acceleration when watching the same video. The gap between Windows and Mac OS X when it comes to Flash is gradually closing – the ability for plugins to access Core Animation via the NPAPI is resulting in a video software decoding by the rendering going down the OpenGL path which is what CSS3 animation is using via Core Animation.
The old system used Quartz2D which isn’t apparently suited for animation/video but Core Animation is which should result in a smoother experience. Hopefully with more optimisation, Webkit2 keeps developing, that the over all experience with Flash on Mac OS X will improve.
PowerPC Powerbook 15″
Safari 5 on Leopard 10.5.8
Safari before entering YouTube to watch the World Cup ad: 4% CPU utilization.
Hitting that Flash:
80% CPU utilization.
Me thinks they haven’t optimized for PowerPC.
Does your GPU support Core Animation? you’ll probably find that the majority of the optimisation would have gone into Intel rather than PowerPC. At the end of the day, the PowerPC is dead and there is no use spending resources optimising for a dead platform – time to move on, upgrade and embrace the future.
PPC isn’t dead.
Just Apples support and use of it.
I forgot to mention that Core Animation support only exists in 10.6 so it is a Intel only piece of technology. So even if Flash were optimised one would be SOL in any case.
Just downloaded 10.1 for Linux, and it didn’t work. On closer inspection I noticed it’s a 32-bit only release, no 64-bit versions available yet! WTF!!
Out of curiosity, what do you all need 64-bit for on a desktop OS ?
Myself, I love the improvements in AMD64 as an architecture, but seriously, who really needs more than 4 GB of RAM on a desktop computer as of today, except for running a few overtaxed Windows/OSX programs like Adobe’s CS ?
…
…
Understood !
Edited 2010-06-11 07:56 UTC
Because we want to use all of our 4 GB RAM obviously. You generally don’t want to buy new computers with less.
Yes, but again what use has this large RAM for most desktop software ? Especially considering that it’s extremely rare that one *single* process uses 4 GB RAM, and that if you just need to run several big processes at the same time, a 64-bit OS is sufficient.
Is this about “my RAM is bigger than yours”, or is it actually useful ?
Edited 2010-06-11 08:30 UTC
Well, if one only tweets, youtubes, facebooks, and whatnot, or develops simple database-frontend webapps, then obviously not.
Otherwise, give me all the memory and all the cores, and I have some fairly hungry algorithms that would be eager to eat it all
[quote]
Yes, but again what use has this large RAM for most desktop software ? Especially considering that it’s extremely rare that one *single* process uses 4 GB RAM, and that if you just need to run several big processes at the same time, a 64-bit OS is sufficient.
Is this about “my RAM is bigger than yours”, or is it actually useful ? [/quote]
Oh let’s see, people who do video editing, graphics work, etc. etc. etc.
Me, I use VMWare and make full use of my 8 Gig of RAM. Not to mention 64 bit is more efficient, especially when it comes to crunching numbers like with data base applications.
32 bit is outdated, has been for a long time. It’s well paste the time for lazy coders to start coding for 64bit.
Edited 2010-06-11 19:14 UTC
Probably because they want to use their CPU at their fullest: remember that with the new registers x86-64 can bring up to a 20% performance improvement, so it’s not only the memory..
Sure, this happens only on very few applications, but it’s still annoying to not be able to use your computer “efficiently” due to poor software.
You’re right, I forgot about the new registers. They surely help performance, compared to the previous EAX/EBX/ECX/EDX/ESP/EBP mess…
20%? For what types of operations? Performance gains on the desktop are negligible and in some cases 32 bit is faster:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2280812,00.asp
64 bit performance really depends on the type of workload:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlprogrammability/archive/2007/04/30/will-…
20%? For what types of operations? Performance gains on the desktop are negligible and in some cases 32 bit is faster:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2280812,00.asp
64 bit performance really depends on the type of workload: