No more Hulu stuttering! (GPU accelerated Flash)

[homerdog]

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

*Works on NVIDIA GPUs >G80 (no 8800GTX/GTS/Ultras), including mobile and integrated stuff. Make sure you have the latest driver (195.55).

*AMD driver should be out later today with support for

• 
  ATI Radeon™ HD 4000, HD 5700 and HD 5800 series graphics
• ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 series graphics (and higher)
• ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 integrated graphics (and higher)
• ATI FirePro™ V3750, V5700, V7750, V8700 and V8750 graphics accelerators (and later)

*h.264 acceleration only works in Windows

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Anandtech mentioned it also works in OSX. But no acceleration for h.264 in any OS other than Windows currently.

Regards,
SB

 

[Brad Grenz]

I updated to the Cat 9.11 drivers for my 4850 in Vista X64 and updated to the 10.1 Flash beta yesterday. Both Chrome and Firefox froze and were completely useless playing Flash video. Had to kill both browsers from task manager. I rolled back to Flash 10.0 for now. Of course, I then discovered DXVA is apparently broken with Cat 9.11 and MPC-HC. Every time I try and play an h.264 file it takes forever to load and then, if I'm lucky, starts playing just the sound with green video.

 

[homerdog]

It seems to be working well on my GTX260.

 

[silent_guy]

I updated to the Cat 9.11 drivers for my 4850 in Vista X64 and updated to the 10.1 Flash beta yesterday. Both Chrome and Firefox froze and were completely useless playing Flash video. Had to kill both browsers from task manager. I rolled back to Flash 10.0 for now. Of course, I then discovered DXVA is apparently broken with Cat 9.11 and MPC-HC. Every time I try and play an h.264 file it takes forever to load and then, if I'm lucky, starts playing just the sound with green video.

Once again AMD/ATI customers are left in the cold.

I bet that Nvidia has been doing its usual sneaky dealings by spending time and resources to help out Adobe to get it right. Do they have no shame?

 

[Xenus]

That's kinda odd that it'll work on some of the g80 derivations but not the 8800GTX

 

[hoom]

Well, at least youtube seemed to be working for me this morning on my 4870 on Win7 x64.

 

[FrameBuffer]

Once again AMD/ATI customers are left in the cold.

I bet that Nvidia has been doing its usual sneaky dealings by spending time and resources to help out Adobe to get it right. Do they have no shame?

I experienced the same issue with the CPU usage shooting up to 100% and staying there however DXVA was fixed upon reboot after driver install.. I chalk it up the Flash 10.1 still being BETA

 

[Blazkowicz]

is it a h264 thing only?
I would like a proper fullscreen mode for flash video, i.e. using overlay/VMR and not triggering the screensaver. this would save many CPU cycles and look better I believe; video could even be piped into ffdshow.

 

[cal_guy]

I updated to the Cat 9.11 drivers for my 4850 in Vista X64 and updated to the 10.1 Flash beta yesterday. Both Chrome and Firefox froze and were completely useless playing Flash video. Had to kill both browsers from task manager. I rolled back to Flash 10.0 for now. Of course, I then discovered DXVA is apparently broken with Cat 9.11 and MPC-HC. Every time I try and play an h.264 file it takes forever to load and then, if I'm lucky, starts playing just the sound with green video.

I got it working when I restarted after the driver install.

 

[Mize]

Interesting that some tests are showing a 50%+ drop in cpu utilization on OS X WITHOUT the gpu. That must have been some uber sloppy code to start with.

 

[Sxotty]

Interesting that some tests are showing a 50%+ drop in cpu utilization on OS X WITHOUT the gpu. That must have been some uber sloppy code to start with.

No doubt. It always seemed ridiculously slow for the quality and compression.

 

[Mize]

Here's another question...if linux and os x have hardware acceleration for video in their drivers (they do for both ATI and nV) and programs like vlc support it (they do), then why is this so difficult for Adobe? What am I missing?

[Edit: looks like VLC doesn't but ffmpeg, movieplayer, etc. have hardware accelerated h.264]

 

[Bludd]

That's kinda odd that it'll work on some of the g80 derivations but not the 8800GTX

Not really, it probably has to do with the video processing chip. The later GeForce 8 models have a different video processing chip than the earlier ones.

 

[Florin]

That's kinda odd that it'll work on some of the g80 derivations but not the 8800GTX

Probably has something to do with the fact that G80 only has rudimentary support for video acceleration (more specifically, only version 1 PureVideo support). G84/G86 have a much more complete featureset.

 

[mczak]

Not really, it probably has to do with the video processing chip. The later GeForce 8 models have a different video processing chip than the earlier ones.

Indeed, I don't think G80 (PureVideo HD, sometimes called VP1) really can do much in terms of h.264 acceleration - afaik it could do some mpeg2 decoding, and had (shader based) motion compensation/deblocking. But VP2 is needed for full acceleration (this is similar to the first r6xx chip, r600, which also lacks dedicated video acceleration functionality).
That said, I wonder why it doesn't work with amd's UVD1 based chips (r6xx except r600). I thought the main difference between UVD1 and UVD2 was the latter could handle two streams at once...

 

[vazel]

Will this work with Hulu Desktop? Is that self-contained or does it use the IE active-x Flash?

Edit: It uses IE's flash.

 

[homerdog]

This will be brilliant for my dad's HTPC, which has my old 8800GT but only an Athlon X2 3800+. Hulu was literally unusable before.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I can't understand why flash video is so damn heavy (regular youtube slow on an old P4 when going fullscreen? WTF)
Nor why wouldn't internet-grade 720p h264 work on a regular PC : such a file, played with ffdshow takes about half of a modern singlecore (and that's with deblocking, luma fix, xsharpen)

 

[homerdog]

I can't understand why flash video is so damn heavy

Neither can I. If you go to ABC.com you can watch shows flawlessly in 720p on a years old system. The same shows on Hulu in 480p are a stuttery, useless mess.