Graphics acceleration for Flash from NVIDIA

Adobe and NVIDIA have announced what will perhaps be one of the first definite developments of its Open Screen project: their collaboration will allow Flash to use graphics chip capacity for video decoding.

Flash is often criticised for the demands it puts on resources of the central processor. This may well be a significant step forward: according to Adobe, Flash will eventually be able to pass on video decoding, in particular those encoded in H.264, to the graphics processor.

Flash is of course used a lot on the Internet to created applications but also to broadcast multimedia content. In particular it's the technology of choice for numerous video sites such as YouTube. Capacity to broadcast HD video in H.264 is currently very limited, amongst other things by users' computers: decoding this sort of flow is currently too demanding for most netbooks.

If however you can get the work done by the graphics processor, a quite modest setup will do the job: according to a joint statement from Adobe and NVIDIA, a Tegra chip (ARM based system, designed for mobile phones and with a dedicated graphics part) should be able to do this.

This could well accelerate the deployment of HD and also relieve the processor and make Flash videos more user-friendly for netbooks and other mobile devices – while waiting for Open Screen to bring Flash to all types of display.