August 10, 2010

Flash video gets more efficient on Macs

I’m pleased to see that today’s update to Flash Player 10.1 (get it here) brings hardware-accelerated playback of H.264-encoded video to the Mac. Similar support has been available on Windows for some time, but it wasn’t until a recent OS update (10.6.3) that Apple enabled plug-in access to the necessary APIs. The Flash Player & Safari teams worked closely together to get things humming.

Long story short: If you’re running Snow Leopard on a supported Mac, you should get video playback with much lower CPU usage. If you’d like details see Flash Player engineer Tinic Uro’s post from April.

Barbie vs. the 7D

Silly, but kind of fun. (Man, as a kid I’d have gone bananas for/with an affordable video camera.) [Via Stephen Shankland]

Creator Brandon Bloch notes, “This is also a spoof of another video that compared the Canon 7D and iPhone 4: ‘iPhone 4 as good as the 7D? No, but it’s amazing for what it is.’”