We told you last week about Apple providing 3rd party developers with Hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 video on compatible graphics cards. It seems like Adobe has taken advantage by including support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3 in a preview release of 10.1 Flash Player beta for Mac OS X.
Hardware video decoding support in Flash Player essentially provides smoother, higher quality video playback by offloading H.264 video decoding tasks from the CPU. This will result in increased battery life and improved video playback performance.
The prerelease beta version of Flash Player for Mac OS X has been code-named “Gala” and requires specific hardware including the GeForce GT 330M, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M. Here is a list of compatible Macs via this handy blog post.
* MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
* Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
* MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
* iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009
[via MacRumors]
