Thoughts, ramblings and ridiculousness of Daryl Ducharme
Daryl Ducharme is an entertainer by nature, a tech muse by trade, and a walking dad joke. He's got lots of ideas that he'd like to share and he wants to hear yours.
In last week's Flash Friday post I wrote about using resource bundles to handle embedded fonts. I also left out any instructions about how to set up your project to use resource bundles, instead telling the reader to search the interwebs. I also said I would provide one of my own instructions so here it is.
At my current work, Provis Media Group, we do a lot of video for the web. We've had a lot of success with larger format video than is usually delivered via the internet. When Flash Player™ 9.0.115 came out allowing fullscreen h.264 video delivery things really took off. Quality went way up and we were able to deliver 720p+ content over the internet. In full screen it looked great. However, when we shrunk a video smaller than its true size some artifacting would occur. Really, it wasn't that terrible but we pride ourselves on the quality of video we deliver, especially since most of it is done in house.
When flash player 10 came out we noticed 2 new wmodes, direct and gpu. Both were suppose to affect drawing performance on the screen and we thought gpu mode should improve the quality of our videos. In order to be sure we had to test it and compare it to the default mode that we almost always use.
Test after test proved that there really wasn't any noticeable difference. In fact, wmode=gpu didn't provide any noticeable playback difference but it did affect the player. [ad#Adobe Banner] The more we read, the more it sounded like wmode=gpu really wouldn't do much for most people until Flash Player™ 10.1 ( currently in beta 2 version on Adobe labs ). Installing Flash Player 10.1 did improve performance on the CPU ( which is awesome ) but their still wasn't a difference from the default.
In the end the best thing to do with our video was to turn smoothing on. This actually made a dramatic improvement. In Flash Player 10.1 you get enough of a performance increase to make this work on even slower computers than before.
So wmode=gpu still may not be a magic bullet unless you control the playback platform but turning on smoothing gives you good performance if you are having artifacting when your videos get resized. You still need to be concerned about cpu performance ( for now ) but flash player 10.1 will really improve that.
If you have had different results or even the same, I'd love to hear your experiences. If you celebrate Christmas today then Merry Christmas and to everyone Seasons' Greetings and Happy Holidays.
It's been a long time coming but Adobe has finally announced a beta, 64 bit version of flash player 10. Get this, it is only available for Linux ( at this point ). Linux fan boys can now relish in the fact that they are getting some special treatment. Of course it is still not open source so many won't be happy.
The comment thread on slashdot should be interesting.
If you are interested, checkout the Flash Player page at Adobe Labs.
Unfortunately, for those developing on Linux ( like me ), there are no plans for a debugger version. Oh well, I guess I'll stick with the plugin wrapper.
Last week Flash Player 10 was officially released. If you haven't already updated, update now. This post isn't about that. Being as halloween is around the corner I began to look at Homestar Runner again. Through the wonders of google search I found the following little gem. ...
Homestarrunner's tribute to Flash's 10th Birthday:
Homestar Runner was the inspiration for me to get into flash and realize I liked programming a lot more than cartooning. Without Homestar Runner who knows what I'd be doing now.
If you are wondering, I got nostalgic about the burninator and it led me to the Flash Birthday Movie
Flash Player 10 is now official. Lot's of great stuff in this version and people have been creating content for it for months. Also, some of the player enhancements will just make certain things better, since there are more ways your graphics card can be used to making viewing better.