Nearly two years ago, Adobe announced that the Flash 9 player would support H.264. There was talk of ‘hardware acceleration’ too but event though we’re up to version 10 of the player, its still one of the most CPU-heavy video playback methods there is. Not only does it appear (in testing with many UMPCs over the last 2 years) to be CPU intensive but it still can’t hook into any H.264 hardware decoding that is available on many pc’s out there now. What are Adobe doing?

Is there a problem with hooking into the hardware layer? XP was always difficult in that respect but Windows Vista introduced  DXVA 2.0 which was supposed to make hardware acceleration easier. Not easy enough for Adobe it seems.

They must know about the problem because you don’t have to search too far in the netbook computing space to find a ton of questions about the topic. The flash video experience on a netbook, umpc and MID simply sucks! It looks like it will take a big GPU manufacturer to convince (read: pay) Adobe to fix this and that’s why Nvidia and Broadcom have said that things will change in 2010. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help the majority of the small , cheap PCs based on the GMA950 and GMA500 chipset. It looks like nothing will change for devices based on these platforms.

One hope for the big low-cost, low-end (largely Intel-based) notebook and mobile computing market is that Intel get together with Adobe to make sure that the next generation of the netbook platform and mobile computing platform  is supported. No-one knows what GPU core is in those platforms yet (Pinetrail and Moorestown) so maybe Intel will surprise us with a Broadcom core and a hardware accelerated Adobe Flash player in Moblin at IDF in Sept. As for the high-end devices, maybe Adobe is just happy to let everything run in big fat, power-hungry CPUs.