Flash Player loss of fluidity in videos

Question

Hello,
I have been using flash player for a long time on my Windows 7 64 bit laptop (primarily on Internet Explorer 9). One thing I noticed around about Flash 11.6 / 11.7 is the video playback within windowed & full screen mode (regardless of whether hardware acceleration is enabled or not) has lost some fluidity. It is a little bit tricky to detect but the video playback is definitely not as butter smooth as it once was almost as if some frames get dropped. I checked the console for dropped frames and there are none reported though. So it is a little strange, I notice the slight lack of smoothness on BBC iPlayer (SD and HD videos) and on Youtube as they are really the only sites I use. I have no audio problems and am pretty convinced my laptop is not too blame. Upgrading Internet Explorer to versions 10 and 11 make no difference. Same performance. The videos are still watchable but I do detect it.
An interesting side note is that I also have Mozilla Firefox installed. For a long time this had Flash 11.2 installed and the video playback with this version was smooth as silk. I brought it upto date with 11.9 and notice the same slight loss of fluidity as I do in 11.9 in internet explorer. I suspect around 11.6 / 11.7 is when I picked up on the performance hit. Although since then I obediently update every month (as recommended practice). I hoped that at some point the player performance would have been improved/fixed with the next version but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
It is not my machine as it is a pretty powerful laptop running a sandybridge cpu with AMD Radeon 6970m gpu. I also have an integrated intel gpu on the sandybridge and switching to this makes no difference. Exactly the same performance, so that rules out GPU drivers. The laptop performs awesome under 3d mark benchmark tests and runs silverlight and HTML5 video fantastically. It is just the flash video performance that is proving to be a slight letdown.
Many thanks,
Wayne

Answer 1

Well I fixed it. I rolled back. Chose a version that I thought was ok - did 11.5 something or other. Totally fluid in IE9. I reinstalled the latest 11.9 in Mozilla and still was a bit choppy. I will keep Mozilla upto date and kind of use it to test flash performance. If a version ever comes out again which plays fluid then I will apply it to IE.
Bit cross though, why do Adobe have to do so many updates. Are they really necessary. If it ain't broke then don't fix it. They are all at it, adobe, Microsoft, apple - change for sake of change leaving a trail of carnage behind. I mean what does 11.9 do over 11.1 for example, some irrelevant under the hood changes which are of no interest to a basic user who just wants to be able to view a fluid video. Overkill if you ask me