Posts Tagged ‘video’
Adobe Flash Roasts My ‘Chestnuts’ w/50% CPU Use
All the brouhaha about no-Flash on the Apple iPad, how great Flash is (by the Adobe folks) and how HTML5 will be the savior of us all is not lost on any of us in the tech community. So having experienced the resource needs of the hungry runtime known as Flash, I decided to do a quick-n-dirty experiment to see just how much CPU is used by the Flash runtime to play a video on my 2.33Ghz, Intel Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Macbook Pro.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and posted the video today (in Flash, naturally). I thought it would be ironic to test the CPU use of Flash as a layman — a man who frequently has his “chestnuts” roasted from the nearly open fire of heat on the bottom of my Macbook Pro generated by the CPU being driven really, really hard by Flash — by playing his video in Flash and measuring its CPU utilization vs. a video played in HTML5 (on the YouTube beta site for HTML5 videos).
Bottom line? Flash uses on average 50% of my Macbook Pro CPU to play a video and HTML5 uses “in the teens” (15% – 19%). If you want to see more, watch this VERY rough and quick-n-dirty video (sorry about the cheesy audio) I did to show you why I’m pleased that, either Adobe make Flash awesome, or Apple NOT put it in to the iPad:
UPDATE: If you’d like to read one of the best overviews I’ve seen yet of the controversy — and whether or not the iPad even needs a Flash runtime for video or anything else — see this AppleInsider post entitled, “Inside Apple’s iPad: Adobe Flash“. It’s a three page article so be sure to read all the pages.
UPDATE 2: An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash
Storytellers, Filmmakers & You
Prisoner by dub72 @DeviantArt
Archaeologists suggest that the written word has been around for about 6,000 years. Before that knowledge was disseminated amongst humans through storytelling. If modern humans have been hanging around the earth for about 200,000 years, that means that for 194,000 years we developed a pretty robust capacity to capture the essence and meaning of critical information through the telling of stories.
I’ve been slowly but surely seeking out great storytellers who are leveraging the internet TV/video delivery capability to create, edit and publish their stories. Since I’m less interested in watching a couple of kids lip-synching or dancing to their favorite artist on YouTube, I’ve been gravitating toward higher quality sites like Vimeo and watching these videos really gets the wheels turning in my head, especially when I poke around within their over 5,000 HD channels, often watching while on the treadmill through my Roku box connected to a 26″ HDTV in the exercise room (a room which is used frequently here in Minnesota in the winter!).
Sometimes the videos are goofy. Often they’re visually stunning with no point other than experimenting with the technology. Other times they’re just too long and the storytelling is painfully dull. All that said, the gems I find most of the time make poking around the others worth the effort and I often wonder who the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg will be from this batch of budding filmmakers.
Last night on the treadmill I came across this sweet little story made by a woman named Karen Abad for her grad school cinematography class. It’s less than 3 minutes long, you should watch it until the end to “get” the point, and then check out the other HD channels to see some more great stories.