On Tuesday Adobe released Flash Player 10.1.82.76 which includes H.264 decoding for Mac’s. What does this mean for the average Mac user? In plain terms, H.264 video requires extra computer processing power to decode and playback smoothly on the web. Choppy playback and buffering of videos can happen without this extra power. On the Windows side of things, Flash has long been able to use a viewer’s graphic card to harness this extra processing power. But it never could on a Mac. Until now. Kind of.
The newest release of Flash Player enables H.264 encoding on some Mac’s. Specifically, you need Mac OSX 10.6.3 or above and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce GT 320M, or GeForce GT 330M graphic card. Why aren’t other cards supported? Essentially, it’s because Apple isn’t exactly jumping through hoops when it comes to Adobe and their efforts to improve Flash performance on Mac’s.
In any event, if you own a Mac that has the above specs, Adobe reports you can achieve up to a two-thirds reduction in CPU utilization with the update (that means much better performance).
Hey Dave, This is good news. Do you know if Apple are doing anything to address the issue of viewing Flash websites on the iPad or iPhone yet? To me this is a big issue.
Thanks,
Natasha
@Natasha – Apple will likely never support Flash as they consider it obsolete technology.