Adobe Flash Player 10.1 To Support VDPAU?

Adobe announced this week from their worldwide developer conference that Flash Player 10.1 would receive GPU-acceleration for video playback on netbooks and mobile devices when using a NVIDIA GeForce, ION, or Tegra graphics processor. This move is to allow SD and HD video content to be played through Flash on low-end, low-power hardware devices that are powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The press release with the details regarding this feature coming to Adobe Flash Player 10.1 can be found at Adobe.com.

Adobe's Flash Linux blog, Penguin.SWF, references this hardware accelerated video playback, but provides no greater details. The press release does not mention Linux support, but with it being referenced by their Linux blog, it is to be assumed that there is especially with their recent ramping up of Linux support that matches that of their Windows player.

With Linux support and NVIDIA-focused GPU acceleration, it is anticipated that the Linux version is using VDPAU to provide this support. If this is the case, NVIDIA Linux users will be in for a real treat soon as this release emerges. We have found VDPAU to offer excellent performance and does very well with low-end hardware for offloading high-definition video playback to the GPU rather than the CPU. NVIDIA also continues to further enrich its proprietary driver implementation of the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix.

VDPAU support can be found in MPlayer and FFmpeg as well as MythTV, Xine, VLC Media Player, XBMC, and other multimedia applications.

While this is good news for those users with NVIDIA's proprietary graphics drivers, users of other hardware and drivers will be out of luck without VDPAU. Working at the same time though in the open-source Gnash project to implement Adobe Flash support is a patch for H.264 video playback acceleration using VA-API.