Notices

Is it very possible that Nokia will never update flash on the n900? What is their past record on updates? Do they tend to update their software often?

That's not quite what I meant. I'm very much looking forward to see Flash 10.1 on the N900.

I was talking about a negative-thanks button because the fact that flash 10.1 was already shown on the n900 by adobe and the date when it will be released have already been discussed at length in different threads, and a simple search would have turned up everything we know about it. I would have loved to see this thread actually considering performance and not to drift to the usual "(when) will flash 10.1 be released".

Ah now your previous comment makes more sense

it not even sure 10.1 will be available for n900 as far as i can tell. Have not heard anything about that, except the demo.

So would Flash 10.1 enable sites like 4oD to play and stream without any stuttering/slow downs ?

I think many of us are (secretly) hoping that 10.1 will come with 1.2 on Wed. AND we'll all be streaming hulu at desktop speeds on the train to work on Thursday morning. Wow, I guess I got too excited there.. I think I have to change my ipad now....

@Konceptz

I got a whole stack of ipads i stole from my workmates "I(fan)boy box"
I could send to you, just make sure to wipe em clean before you put em on

And since we been spoiled with 2 fast FW updates i´m optimistic of other improvments!

Is the big update really due on Wednesday or is that what you're hoping for?

I can't get hulu I am in the UK and it says only people in USA can view this. If anyone knows of a work around... let me know.

I really hope I will be able to view 4OD , Itv player, iPlayer and Tvshack without any problems

From what I've heard (I still have several good contacts within Adobe) all the mobile versions are kind-of-a two-way street with OSP in the middle. Adobe had nearly enough info to really utilize the OMAP3 platform, but there were some things missing which made the development slower than anticipated (hence the move from Q1 to Q2, and possibly even further delays), and on top of that Adobe was way too ambitious thinking they could squeeze out a desktop-grade performance from a pretty weak ARMEL. All the mobile versions are in testing, but it's not clear when will they be available. Further, Adobe wants to release them all at once (at least Android and webOS ones) to get some positive marketing out of it, while different manufacturers insist on their platform (and not just the OS) to be the first for their own personal marketing. And if that wouldn't be enough, Android support is actually the trickiest one due to quite different platforms running it (and Dalvik doesn't help either) - that's the reason why there was a rumor that it will be available only on Android 2.2 which does not have to support all the previous (weaker) platforms. Bottom line is that it's still not ready for a mass push and I don't think we'll be seeing it in PR1.2, although I couldn't get any info for Maemo - maybe Nokia convinced them to go for it as the Maemo version is actually the easiest one for Adobe - it's basically the same code base they are using for their desktop Linux players, and the low-level stuff (hardware acceleration) is pretty much the same on all OMAP3 version. Unfortunately, Maemo is not as popular as the other platforms, so it's not pretty high on Adobe's list, otherwise we would already have the 10.1... I'm also pretty sure that Adobe would like to release their players the same way they are doing for desktops, but there is even stronger opposition to that from the manufacturers as all of them insist that they should be in charge which device and when gets a Flash update...

As for the performance, as I already mentioned in this thread, don't be too ecstatic about it - it will most definitely speed up video usage (for H.264 videos, that is), but apart from that it's a gray area. All the Flash you see on the web was developed with desktop in mind (starting from many things dependent on roll-over which is technically impossible for a touchscreen, all the way to performance of modern dual/quad cores) and small devices will certainly have problems on plenty of Flash sites (optimization is a two-way process, you can only go this far on the client VM). Also, when you watch video you are forgetting that there is a good chunk of code for handling it in the back, and in most cases it's either dependent on the FLVPlayback (and derivatives) `native` component, which is way unoptimized and resource spending, or on some really crappy custom-built code. Add graphics handling on top of it and you got enough to warm your CPU even without the video playing. I already mentioned YT's player as one of pretty bad ones, but most of them out there are. So, there can be no guarantees that all the video on the net will suddenly fly once we get 10.1 with H.264 accel. video - in a vanilla state (core .swf instantiating only the Video class) it will probably fly compared to the current version, and that by itself should be enough to stream Hulu/iPlayer/whatever-video-there-is-in-a-sane-size, but any overhead added by crappy developers on top of that will be felt and could possibly render those services unusable even if the video is HW accelerated.

I, personally, have much higher hopes for the vector HW acceleration (it's been tried before, didn't really give satisfactory results for broad usage such as Flash), as that part (vector rendering) is actually the only thing where Flash developers cannot do much optimizations and what use is Flash if you don't have all those nice interfaces running and rendering happily. That, by itself, would add much more of an impact for Flash performance all over the web, not just the video streaming (even tho 90% of the people wanting Flash on their devices primarily think of its video capabilities and a sheer spread of Flash video all over the interwebs).

Hmmm, please go and tell that to all those moaners and FUD-evangelists on the `MeeGo / Harmattan on N900?` threads as they claim that Nokia have left them with a dead-end device and that Nokia does not really care for what happens with the N900. I'd like to see 2 minor and 2 major updates within 3 months of a device lifetime at any competitor's road map. But that ain't clearly enough for people to feel secure that their device is supported. Go figure...