Flash vs the World
When it comes to video playback on the Mac, Flash is by no means king.
I didn’t realise quite how bad it was until the new iPlayer HD service launched.
It’s okay fullscreen, but hit Escape with the video still playing, and Flash does a really poor job of downscaling that 720p stream. Really bad.
Exhibit A: VLC downscaling a 1080p video. Note the CPU usage—it’s software decoding, so it won’t be brilliant, but it’s less than half of the available resource (Mac OS X measures per-process CPU usage as a percentage of a single core, so 100% means the equivalent of one core being fully utilised). You can’t see from the picture, but playback was as smooth as a bell.
Exhibit B: Flash downscaling a 720p video. In this case, CPU usage is through the roof—one and a half cores just handed over to Flash. The worst part is, despite all of this resource utilisation, the playback frame rate dropped to somewhere between 5 and 15 frames per second.
For what it’s worth, the first video was H.264 and AC3 surround sound wrapped in an MPEG 2 transport stream. The second is H.264 and AAC audio streamed by Flash Media Server.
This is why Mac users really quite dislike Flash: there’s nothing wrong with the hardware, and other software manages to do the video playback that Flash is often used for without breaking a sweat. Macromedia originally, and now Adobe, have done a shockingly bad job of maintaining the Flash player for the Mac. From what I’ve read, the same applies to the 64-bit Linux plug-in, too.
