Why You Should Install Adobe’s Flash 10.1 Gala Preview

By

post-40718-image-fc8cd8e48823c9cd5e7b83e775b2bc3c-jpg

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.

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.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.