Adobe's excuse about not having a hardware acceleration API is a red herring, and a painfully obvious lie if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. There are several reasons I have come to this conclusion.<p>1. This is clearly demonstrated when you play a video "natively" through flash on OS X. Watch as the &#60; SD resolution video immediately hogs an entire core of your CPU; in fact the lagging starts almost from the moment the flash object is initialized! Even a trivial operation like clicking fullscreen on a YouTube video locks up the entire host process and beachballs Safari for 5+ seconds as it sits there with it's thumbs stuck up it's arse, causing you to miss whatever was playing at the time.<p>2. Ok, so now try playing the same video through XP etc on VMWare or Parallels on the same machine. What's this? It's perfectly responsive and uses a small fraction of the CPU power? Apparently it is ≈5x less CPU intensive to emulate and deal with the overhead of virtualising an entire PC, it's CPU and associated operating system than it is to run the same thing natively on the host OS. *Note that due to limitations inherent in virtualisation, there is no access to any kind of video acceleration whatsoever, let alone assisted h.264 decoding. You have a framebuffer and that's about it (and even that highly abstracted, double buffered, composited and managed by Quartz as with every other window on the system)<p>3. My original MacBook which I still use has no hardware assist (GMA950) - yet QuickTime manages playback of fullscreen or windowed 1920x1080 h264 at around the same CPU usage playing a fucking YouTube video.
4. Flash video on the mac has always been excruciatingly slow, even before h.264. I remember seeing iMac G3 600Mhz's struggling to maintain even 15fps with postage-stamp sized h.261 (which is what YouTube used to use) just 5 odd years ago. A G3 600 is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what is required to playback video of that complexity. A G4 867 can do 640x480 h264. Clearly something is very very rotten in flash, and getting more offensively pungent by the day. Which now brings me to:<p>What in the everloving FUCK could their code possibly be doing?!?!<p>I think their programmers have quite clearly gone insane and subscribed to (or invented?) the Rube Goldberg school of software engineering - I don't see any other rational explanation.<p>I'm quite certain we could have cured cancer while making SETI look like the equivalent of someone with a funnel stuck in their ear and pointed at the sky, what with the aggregate difference in CPU cycles of mac flash vs windows.<p>Meanwhile, if Adobe can't even manage to lie effectively about the reasons why their own software is so utterly broken, I'm not holding my breath for a resolution. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, though if you ask them it's all Apple's fault.<p>To think that people want flash on the iPhone. God almighty, haven't we all suffered enough?