Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.
Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.
“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”
Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
