Why You Should Install Adobe’s Flash 10.1 Gala Preview

Will Moore ()

Why You Should Install Adobe’s Flash 10.1 Gala Preview

Yesterday I installed Adobe’s new preview of Flash 10.1 on a couple of my Macs, and even though Steve Jobs has just dinged his old partners for being slow to release good Mac software, this release rocks.

Here’s why you need to install it on your Mac right now.


I installed Adobe’s Gala preview on my late-2008 iMac and my late-2009 Macbook Pro. I have to say that I am very impressed.

The Flash preview taps into a new Apple API that allows low-level access to NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, 320M and GT 330M H.264 graphics hardware.

The playback interface is much slicker and puts the YouTube player visually on a par with Vimeo once again. I have been testing video playback all day and so far, it has been flawless. Small clips (360p) buffer very quickly and full 1080p movies play seamlessly.

Though I have been unable to run full benchmark tests yet, a six-minute 1080p video only caused a three degree rise in temperature and no increase in fan speed. This will come as welcome news to anyone who has had their legs melted from watching YouTube for half an hour.

I also opened five separate 480p videos and left them playing in the background whilst browsing other sites. I am pleased to report that Firefox didn’t crash!

There is similar good news to report with rich-media banners and page-takeover adverts, all of which loaded without any noticeable page hang or delay.

The new release adds advanced hardware encoding features that allow the processing load to be spread across the GPU as well as the CPU.

To quote from the Adobe site:

Flash 10.1 Gala release introduces support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3, the most recent release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Gala allows developers to preview Flash Player with hardware acceleration of H.264 video on supported Mac computers equipped with the following GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. The hardware acceleration functionality in the Gala preview release of Flash Player is expected to be included in an update following the release of Flash Player 10.1.

DON'T MISS
Adobe Flash And Other Third-Party Programs Will Now Be Able To Use GPU To Decode Video

As you can see, you will only be able to give this a try if you are rocking an Intel Mac with OS 10.6.3 as a minimum.

Only time will tell who the ultimate victor will be between Flash and HTML5 video, but for now this update makes browsing video and graphics on a Mac far less of a pain then it was yesterday

You can grab the preview directly from Adobe’s servers here or to find out more view the specifications page here.

Normal advice applies. As it’s a developer release, proceed with caution.

16 comments »

About the author

clevercode

Will Moore is a freelance writer based in the UK - He specializes in consumer technology and is a long time Apple fan. As well as cultofmac.com, Will also writes for a number of popular european tech sites such as techradar.com, electricpig.co.uk, The Gadget Show and more. He is married and lives in Maidstone UK, with his wife, Lydia. A keen amateur photographer and videographer, Will can often be found around the UK coastline documenting one of his loves - the sea and UK surf scene.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in Mac, News, OS X | Tagged: , , |

  • Gary

    Does anyone know whats the big difference between my 8600gt and the new cards?

    Would it be possible to see hardware acceleration on my hardware?

    I think windows has it :S

  • Brian

    Nice to hear, but this doesn’t help me on my early-2008 MBP with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card. [sigh] Is that a restriction in the API Apple opened up, or is that a restriction imposed by Adobe? Either way, ClickToFlash is still my tool of choice for keeping Flash under control on my Mac!

  • Jesus

    Apple>windows

  • http://www.backbeatmedia.com/ Dave Hamilton

    I installed it, relaunched Safari, but the plugins CPU usage was the same viewing a YouTube clip. Is this only for *some* YouTube clips, or do I have an installation issue here?

  • Brian M

    This initial beta only has hardware acceleration for H.264 based flash video, and only on the 3 mentioned chips (9400, 320M, 330M) (Because that is all that the Apple API opened up)

    there was mention somewhere on an Adobe page that more chips would be supported in future.

  • Rich

    Couple of interesting things:

    If it’s working you get a white square in the top right corner of the video.

    It only works for 2 videos at once, after that they will be software rendered.

    Some youtube videos are encoded with 864 * 480 resolution – these won’t work.

    Videos smaller than 480 * 320 pixels don’t use hardware acceleration on NVIDIA GeForce 9400M – on other chipsets the limit is higher.

  • Louis

    The 8600M GT can accelerate h264 according to some nvidia chart I looked up some time ago. Apple simply chooses not to implement hardware support for that chip. If you want hardware acc buy new hardware….

  • Fábio Morbec

    Well … I installed this Gala and I noticed some crashes in Dock and Finder … I am using the Intel GMA X3100 chipset …

  • IcyFog

    I’ll pass … of course I have to because this isn’t a Universal app. Even when I upgrade my Mac, I think I’ll still pass.

  • toke

    Yep,
    thanks Apple!
    “Buy a new Mac and you’ll even get hardware video decoding!”
    And how long this have been in Windows? A decade?
    Older Macs are left for landfills?
    Pretty “green” when the older ones would benefit this the most…

  • Hayden

    Too bad my 2006 MBP isn’t compatible with this.

  • http://forums.adobe.com/thread/627856?tstart=0 !Update Drivers!

    FYI: Updating your GPU drivers are very important as they also provide improve performance, fixes errors/glitches, and adds features.(More support)

    The more API’s Apple allows for third party use, the better, less users being left out. Hopefully more MAC users can test “Gala” so that all the bugs can be worked out.(Only those who are experienced or got nutz ;)

  • king

    i have geforce 94000 ,
    i installed this,, It works it even showed me the white square that it is working
    but on my macbook i see no improvement in performance

  • http://forums.adobe.com/thread/627856?tstart=0 !Update Drivers!

    @King, If you have problems or questions…Follow the link below and ask Adobe engineers directly. – You will get responses.

    http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/flashplayer10/gala/

  • Anim8me2

    @toke
    Why “thanks Apple”?
    This is Flash we are talking about, I think you should be “Thanking” Adobe.

  • Gil

    Adobe, a decade to produce a Creative Suite in Cocoa. Are we happy now? Who cares.

    If all this Flash-Apple crap wasn’t all over the web would they have rushed to produce hardware acceleration for the Mac? No. So again, who cares.