Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Bringing Hardware H.264 Decoding To Macs Out of Beta

John Brownlee ()

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Bringing Hardware H.264 Decoding To Macs Out of Beta

Good news! You can now have H.264 hardware-decoded Flash on your Mac without resorting to installing beta software… just like Windows users have been enjoying for years!

Yep, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is now official and available for download. But it doesn’t work on all Macs. The new video acceleration API is only available in Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later and it’s limited to Macs with GPUs like the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M.

More specifically, here are the Macs that can take advantage of the new Flash player’s hardware decoding:

• MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
• Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
• MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
• iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

For the record, we loved the earlier Adobe Flash 10.1 beta: it’s a huge leap forward for Flash performance on Macs, specifically when it comes to streaming high-definition video. If you’re rocking one of the supported Macs listed above, you should install the latest Flash update now.

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[via Hard Mac]

7 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in News, Software |

  • MacRat

    Great. Now those worthless flash ads can max out your graphics in addition to your CPU!!

  • king

    I didn’t notice any improvements, in fact, performance might be worse

  • Brian

    And for those of us with older Macs, can we just delete Flash now? ;)

  • John T

    I love it when Adobe comes out with something new I can ignore.

  • http://www.keleko.com Greg Freeman

    @Brian, well said. I can see the future of web video being without flash, most websites these days are not using it very much either.

  • Drizzle

    Its so stupid that I have Flash 10.1 running awesome on my Droid Incredible with Froyo but my dumbass iPhone cant run squat. Macs just now getting this outta beta…what a crappy platform. I am selling all my Apple garbage and going to make a million dollars selling it to iZombies out there willing to buy it.

  • accolon

    “If you’re rocking one of the supported Macs listed above, you should install the latest Flash update now.”

    You should install this update even if you don’t have one of the Macs listed above, since it closes a couple of critical security holes.