At the beginning of the month, Adobe put Flash Player 10.2 up for download, which added a new feature called “Stage Video” to the mix which Adobe claimed would allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” How? Basically, it offloaded the whole video rendering pipeline to your Mac’s GPU.
Sounds like a step up from the current status quo, but there was only one problem: it wasn’t backwards compatible, so sites across the Net would be required to update to the new code to take advantage of Stage Video.
Now Adobe says that many of the bigger players in Flash Video — most notably YouTube — have updated their Flash Player to take advantage of the speed increase.
Nice to hear, of course, but we’ll stick to HTML5 for the moment, until we see some power efficiency benchmarks come down the pipeline. In the meantime, enjoy the video above, in which an Adobe engineer wears a vintage Starfleet shirt that is comically too small.
