While the late war of Word of God between Adobe and Apple over the cellular inclusion of Flash in the latter ’s mobile devices is unlikely to reach a cease fire anytime soon , Apple giveth as well as taketh away . The caller this calendar week release info on how third - company developers can take advantage of ironware acceleration for graphics , a previously unavailable feature that ’s been fault for Flash ’s poor performance on the Mac platform .

Traditionally , Flash has n’t performed nearly as well on OS X as it has on Windows , specially when it come to television playback — despite the fact that these days both platform hunt on comparably - powerful hardware . Adobe has been inexorable that , at least as far as video playback is touch on , any performance issues in Flash are the result of Apple not making the necessary video - decoding program programming interface ( genus Apis ) uncommitted to developers ,   thus prevent them from take reward of hardware acceleration on Macs that stand it .

However , a recently released AppleTechnical Note(a sort of postscript to Apple ’s developer documentation )   forMac OS X 10.6.3details something that might help : a fresh Video Decode Acceleration Framework . The framework seems to be a relatively wide-eyed and straightforward set of APIs to do precisely what Adobe wants : use hardware quickening to decrypt raw H.264 video .

And the fellowship plans to use it , too . “ We will be enabling funding for hardware quicken picture decryption for Flash Player on Mac , ” Adobe interpreter Matt Rozen toldMacworld . “ Now that the requisite APIs are useable , we are working on an extra Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to admit this functionality for the hardware contour suffer by the raw genus Apis . ”

Until now , the only way to take advantage of computer hardware quickening when decoding video was to practice Apple ’s QuickTime genus Apis , which only go with video that is lay in in a “ traditional ” H.264 container , such as an MP4 data file . By let developer utilise the raw computer hardware - decoding capabilities of the graphics processors usable in many Macs , Apple allow decode picture that is lay in inanyformat , even if it ’s not count “ standard . ” By transmit directly with the ironware , an lotion can now decode telecasting regardless of where or how it ’s stash away .

The   Video Decode Acceleration Framework has its limitation : it can only take reward of hardware video decoding with those GPUs that support that functionality ; these include NVIDIA ’s GeForce 9400 M , GeForce 320 M , or GeForce GT 330 M computer graphic chipsets . ( The Technical Note links toa inclination of some late Mac hardware and their graphics chipsets . ) And , because they require Mac OS X 10.6.3 , the new APIs are only uncommitted on Intel - ground Macs .

Still , the cellular inclusion of the framework is a foretoken that Apple may be bid a major olive subdivision to caller like Adobe , allow them to meliorate the performance of their product on OS X , even if they ’re not countenance within fifty yards of the company ’s roving gadget .

update 1:23PT to add scuttlebutt from Adboe .