64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha

Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."

Downtime is the name of the game

[Coopjust]

Man, Flash Player locks up the CPU and crashes more often with gold releases than most alpha software. I think you'd have to be sadist to run software in alpha for Linux from Adobe.

Seriously, I hope it leads to an improvement for the Flash Player for the platform- it's sorely needed.

On another note, I was surprised to hear that H.264 GPU video acceleration in Flash Player 10.1, in addition to being limited to very new cards, only works on Windows, the platform with the most stable Flash Player (stable is relative).

Re:Downtime is the name of the game

[diegocg]

The Adobe Linux guys wrote a blog post explaining why Adobe Flash is so slow [adobe.com]. It seems that because Flash needs to mix the video image with other flash controls, it can't accelerate video like a typical player does. It seems that the HTML5 people have the same problem.

"The key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data. Their counterpart Windows drivers do allow this which is why this feature is supported in Windows.

That's for Linux. What about Mac? I'm not sure but my Mac colleagues have mentioned something about Apple not making their hardware decoding APIs available to applications (if the APIs exist at all, which I'm not sure they do)"