3 ms·

Flash Video Performance: Solving Different Problems

12 points by blasdel 17y ago

dschobel 17y ago
"But at least with HTML5 video tag data, I can download the video and play it offline using a dedicated player." Try to keep up here. That's not the problem that Flash Player is chartered to solve (same goes for HTML5 video). I know you're smart enough to download videos and watch them offline, but try to think on a macro level. Not the most useful tone to take when trying to explain your technology and win people over...
- blasdel 17y ago
  Given the scorn heaped upon him from us internet assholes, I think it's appropriate for him to reply with some gentle snark. We'd think worse of him if he didn't -- he'd sound like a suit.
imurray 17y ago
"But minority browsers don't use as much CPU while playing HTML5 video tag data." Are you sure about that? Yes. I just tried it again to be doubly sure. In Chrome the YouTube HTML 5 demo uses 2/3 of the CPU used by the Flash-based version. In Firefox playing the demo ogg files at: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html uses about half the CPU than playing the video with Flash in YouTube. This is all in Linux.
- blasdel 17y ago
  Sure, playing Theora from <video> takes about half the CPU that the Linux Flash plugin playing h264 does. His point is that they both have to do similar YUV-RGB and rich compositing bullshit within the rendering runtime -- and they're within the same order of magnitude of performance. mplayer takes a 1/20th the CPU cycles on the same normal desktop machine without even using hardware decoding optimizations. I wouldn't be surprised if its CPU usage was nearly optimal for the amount of data copying that needs to take place.
  - imurray 17y ago
    On my machine playing the same videos in mplayer or vlc is very close to the CPU used playing in the browser using the video tag. I did read the article, which continued from the bit I quoted as: As of this writing, browsers that support the video tag are likely to use a tremendous amount of CPU in order to play video. Why? It's likely because they have to deal with the exact same performance penalties that Flash does; specifically, that YUV video data needs to be transformed into RGB data to be plopped in the browser window. The implication was that the video tag will be just as bad as Flash, which just isn't my experience.
  - est 17y ago
    Why don't Flash or video tag invent something like video-only mode? Oh wait, is this something like DirectShow?

12 points by blasdel 17y ago

"But at least with HTML5 video tag data, I can download the video and play it offline using a dedicated player." Try to keep up here. That's not the problem that Flash Player is chartered to solve (same goes for HTML5 video). I know you're smart enough to download videos and watch them offline, but try to think on a macro level. Not the most useful tone to take when trying to explain your technology and win people over...

blasdel 17y ago
Given the scorn heaped upon him from us internet assholes, I think it's appropriate for him to reply with some gentle snark. We'd think worse of him if he didn't -- he'd sound like a suit.

imurray 17y ago

"But minority browsers don't use as much CPU while playing HTML5 video tag data." Are you sure about that? Yes. I just tried it again to be doubly sure. In Chrome the YouTube HTML 5 demo uses 2/3 of the CPU used by the Flash-based version. In Firefox playing the demo ogg files at: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html uses about half the CPU than playing the video with Flash in YouTube. This is all in Linux.

blasdel 17y ago
Sure, playing Theora from <video> takes about half the CPU that the Linux Flash plugin playing h264 does. His point is that they both have to do similar YUV-RGB and rich compositing bullshit within the rendering runtime -- and they're within the same order of magnitude of performance. mplayer takes a 1/20th the CPU cycles on the same normal desktop machine without even using hardware decoding optimizations. I wouldn't be surprised if its CPU usage was nearly optimal for the amount of data copying that needs to take place.
- imurray 17y ago
  On my machine playing the same videos in mplayer or vlc is very close to the CPU used playing in the browser using the video tag. I did read the article, which continued from the bit I quoted as: As of this writing, browsers that support the video tag are likely to use a tremendous amount of CPU in order to play video. Why? It's likely because they have to deal with the exact same performance penalties that Flash does; specifically, that YUV video data needs to be transformed into RGB data to be plopped in the browser window. The implication was that the video tag will be just as bad as Flash, which just isn't my experience.
- est 17y ago
  Why don't Flash or video tag invent something like video-only mode? Oh wait, is this something like DirectShow?