Notices

Hi there

One reason I bought the N900 was the flash suppot wich is great on normal web pages.

I have two issues that are performance related.

1) watching streaming video (can't really watch it - jerkey)

2) 360 degree panoramas (very slow rendering)
(Example http://www.marktold.com/panoramas/ga...s_01_small.swf)

Will an eventual update to Flash 10 help in this matter or is the limitation due to hardware on the N900.

Regards Markus

10 no
10.1 should, as it's the first version with hardware acceleration, and AFAIK the omap3 is one of the "chipsets" that Adobe has implemented for.

Video performance should be improved in 10.1 (will use the hardware H.264 decoder), that crappy panorama rendering probably not - it was written in AS2 and executes in AVM1 which is by itself slow as hell, and if that wasn't enough, there is some ugly-*** coding on top of that.

Flash should generally gain a good performance boost from 10.1, but crappy Flash developers can bring even a full-blown desktop configurations to a halt. That won't change with any new version of Flash player.

"but crappy Flash developers can bring even a full-blown desktop configurations to a halt"

Yes. When a Flash game has issues on a Q8200 quad core with a great video card, you know the app has issues

For well behaving Flash content, based on Adobe forum discussion and people lucky enough to have beta builds of 10.1, the difference is night and day going to 10.1 on mobile devices. A key is the device must still have a good GPU, which the N900 has

Problem with Flash is not that it's bad technology - it's got one of the sweetest VMs out there, and AS3 is quite a sane and potent language - it's that most Flash developers are actually designers that `evolved` into semi-programmers due to a high demand. And from those that genuinely began as Flash `developers`, most of them were script-kiddies used to copy/paste code and in-place calls. Both of those groups have no real understanding on how things work, nor how their code affects the VM and computer it's running on - they just want a quick patch and to make it work no matter what. And since those are the vast majority, Flash got a bad name of being a resource hog (while it effectively eats less resources and works faster than any JavaScript equivalent)... Unfortunately, no matter what Adobe does with the player, issues with Flash will not go away, as there is lots and lots of Flash on the web that will chew through a quad core even for simplest of interfaces.

As for the 10.1, I do believe it will give a good boost for all the Flash video out there (well, for all H.264 encoded video, but that seems to be the majority out there when it comes to popular video services / CDMs) - tho it wouldn't hurt for YT to actually hire somebody competent to rebuild the player they are using - as for general performance I am somewhat skeptical. AVM2 will gain some boost, sure, each new version does (wonders of open-source) and recompiling it for a specific platform with additional accelerators can really speed it up, but when it comes to that vector tessellation approach I don't believe we will gain much of boost. We'll have to wait for GPUs to actually support OpenVG on a driver level before we see any real-world vector graphics rendering speed boost using the GPU. However, I am quite interested to see how the tessellation approach is going to fare - unfortunately that part of the player is not included in the desktop 10.1 betas so until we get it on our devices we'll never know if it delivers what it promised.

will we get flash updates for the n900???

Sorry, but sometimes I wish there was a "No Thanks" button.

So you must be content with running a non-hardware accelerated flash 9 then?

Getting flash 10.1 on the n900 is one of the top things on my wish list. Is this down to Adobe to bring this to the n900? or Nokia?

Adobe already brought it the N900 (the N900 was the first device demoing it last year). I think it's in Nokia's hands now. Adobe doesn't do anything directly with the devices, they just hand it off to the company to package it into whatever operating system the device uses.

So I'm guessing it's probably in internal testing right now on some Nokia employees' devices and they'll probably release it as part of a PR update (but not necessarily 1.2).