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RE: [OzSilverlight] RE: Hardware accelerated video?

Scott Barnes
Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:27:41 -0800

David,

I've been using Flash since its birth, I rarely rush anything to do with Adobe 
:)

As for hardware support, you've not yet outlined why you need it? I can see 
1000 ways as to why hardware acceleration is ideal, but that's me - you 
however, seem to be looking at the window dressing and going "oooh I want 
that.." and haven't stopped to look at the entire bigger picture around it 
firstly and secondly why you need it?

I'm not inclined to give credit to Adobe on this one just yet, I've seen their 
promises on brochure and the real deal is entirely something different. Like I 
said, jury is still out on whether this is actually a good thing overall.

exhibit A: 
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-pixel-bender-in-flash-player-10.html
exhibit B: 
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/what-does-gpu-acceleration-mean.html

I think you should take some time to read more up on the actual GPU 
capabilities in Flash 10?

Scott.








________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Connors [EMAIL 
PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2008 11:16 PM
To: listserver@ozSilverlight.com
Subject: Re: [OzSilverlight] RE: Hardware accelerated video?

Scott Barnes wrote:
Few points:

•         Let’s agree to disagree, as clearly we’re at opposite ends on this 
one ☺

•         It looks pretty good? Any indication as to what you’re about to do 
with it

Do with it? Nothing. We're largely a Microsoft development shop. What I have 
been saying is that you shouldn't be so quick to write it off a new feature 
like hardware acceleration as one of "Flash 10s new toys". I dare say if you 
conducted a straw poll amongst developers and asked them if they thought it 
would be a good thing to enable that across the platform (and cross platform) 
then I can't imagine any would say no.

As a thought experiment, go and spend 20 minutes at 
www.kongregate.com<http://www.kongregate.com> and then ask yourself where it 
might be in 12-24 months if developers start making extensive use of the 
DirectX/OpenGL retargetting built into the runtime.

or is this just what you’ve read from first impressions off their initial press 
releases? (curious to see how well you’ve digested the entire story around 
this).

Yep. I do all my research with press releases.     o  O

[... Lots of stuff about CDNs and other stuff with nothing to do with hardware 
acceleration on the client deleted ...]

•         If flash is your cup of tea, that’s perfectly fine.

It isn't particularly.

I’m not going to  think ill of folks adopting Flash, as it’s really comes down 
to what problems you’re trying to solve, how much investment your about to 
unload and where you think it will take you down the road. If Flash offers an 
edge over Silverlight, then my only query is – “tell me what we missed, so I 
can ensure the next releases cover it..”

How about full cross platform hardware acceleration across the entire runtime?

David



From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 
Behalf Of David Connors
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 1:44 AM
To: listserver@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:listserver@ozsilverlight.com>
Subject: Re: [OzSilverlight] RE: Hardware accelerated video?

Scott,

You probably think I'm yanking your chain and I know this is an SL list but 
seriously "I wouldn't be discouraged by Flash 10's new toys as in the 
end..Flash is still Flash :D" isn't really a good way to advocate a platform.  
Props where props are due - Flash 10 does look pretty good.

Other replies inline...

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Scott Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL 
PROTECTED]>> wrote:

Never stated hardware acceleration was a bad thing? You asked or assumed I 
implied that but I thought I rejected that and answered your question that it 
has to do with implementation.
So to clarify what are the parts of the Adobe implementation that are bad that 
make you think the jury is out?

As for hardware acceleration in the runtime, in what way is that going to be 
beneficial overall (i.e. what are you expecting to see or view in this case?).
I dunno - I'd be expecting to see all of the normal sorts of eye candy enabled 
by using dedicated hardware:
1. High quality filtering and resampling  - not computationally feasible in 
software
2. Alpha transparency of video   - not computationally feasible in software
3. Transformation of video while playing   - not computationally feasible in 
software
4. 3D with trilinear filtering so you can read text that has come out of the 
other end of the rendering pipeline. NFI if Flash 10 does that (probably not) 
but either way you're never going to do it in software.

etc

Cost has to do with Streaming not so much the client viewing, all those bytes 
add up and someone has to pay the bill, especially with CDN folks ☺
What bearing does the hardware acceleration model on the client have on the 
kbps of a video stream it is downloading?

Pre-computation? Could you elaborate on what you mean there?
I probably used a really poor example here that will confuse the conversation - 
but say I open a massive image in PS11/CS4. You can (relatively) smoothly zoom 
into it to your hearts content in real time because the scaling is retargetted 
to hardware. In that case their use of hardware acceleration (while not at all 
relevant to the discussion at hand) appears to be very good. I'd presume that 
if they can enable scenarios like that in an app as old and as complex as PS 
that they'd do a relatively good job of using it in a client runtime. Note: I 
am not saying that downloading a massive image and processing it on the client 
is a substitute for DeepZoom ... I just used that as an app that does something 
similar (hence I said bad example). The point of pre-computation is that when 
SL is displaying a Deep Zoom image it is only really working with screen 
resolution or something pretty close.

I would be curious to know how it would go, performance wise, with a 30 meg 
source image for example.

I won't enter the debate around Sony vs. Samsung,
LOL. Okay ... but you're the one who brought up the analogy.

it's more towards the analogy than the depth of which two brands approach 
consumers in which ways. The fact here in the US, is that you walk into any 
best buy store, look at the TV's on full view and the decision comparisons 
around which to buy typically live in and around price, chrome presentation and 
warranties. It's extremely hard to spot the difference between each HD TV on 
display, there are certain tricks applied – like playing Finding Nemo with 
various tweeks to color profiles to give a "brighter vs. darker" visual queue 
that somehow one trumps the other.

So meh :0
What was the point of your analogy? Are you saying that Flash is all tricks but 
SL is the real deal? Or that they're all the same and you can't tell? I don't 
understand?

--
David Connors ([EMAIL PROTECTED]<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>)
Software Engineer
Codify Pty Ltd - www.codify.com<http://www.codify.com>
Phone: +61 (7) 3210 6268 | Facsimile: +61 (7) 3210 6269 | Mobile: +61 417 189 
363
Address Info: http://www.codify.com/contact
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