GPU Acceleration in Flash

Question

Hi all,
  This is my first post here so if this is the wrong place please excuse the post and move it to the appropriate forum.  I'm working for a company who is using flash to play HD media.  Right now, the systems they are having to buy to play the media conent must have relatively decent CPUs in them due to flash relying mostly on the CPU.  With the flash 10.1 beta there is now obviously a focus on GPU acceleration and we are quite excited about this as it could considerably drop the cost of each of our hardware units.  We have tried some tests thus far however it appears that our flvs are not taking advantage of the GPU acceleration.  The only way I know how to test this is by enabling/disabling the hardware acceleration from the settings menu in flash and then restart the browser to be sure the setting has changed.  I am assuming that our flv is perhaps not encoded in a format that flash will be able to use hardware acceleration for however I am not completely sure of this.  The media encoding is not part of my job on this project howeve I am tasked with the testing of the flv's on carious hardware.  Is there a specific codec that needs to be used or a way of encoding the flv so that flash player 10.1 beta can play the video with hardware acceleration?
  Thanks for your response.  Again as mentioned, I don't know the ins and outs of the encoding process that is currrently being used, but I will pass any infomation gathered here onto our media guys and developers.  I do know that using the flash 10.1 beta on youtube I can play 1080p videos fullscreen using nVidia GPU and an intel atom cpu without any issues with the hardware acceleration on.  WIthout it, the cpu hits 90+% and the video is way to choppy to be of use so hardware acceleration is definitely working there.
Terry

Answer 1

Flash Player 10.1 has its own forum:  http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10
Regarding your question, the easiest thing to do is host an example stream somewhere using that encoding.  It can be a test pattern if you wish, content doesn't matter, just the encoding.    The most common mistake is to use interlaced encoding.  It must be progressive, interlaced will always default to SW decoding.   Its much more inefficient than progressive encoding for SW playback as well.  Its always a bad idea to use interlaced.    Apart from that, there are some harder to describe encoding options that can disable HW decoding.  We would need to see an example encoded stream to tell you what option is defaulting you to software.
Are you only testing on nVidia ION gpus?   If so, there is a known limitation of that gpu that certain unusual video widths (such as 864) are not supported for HW decode.  
If you are testing on other machines, you might also want to make sure the GPUs and GPU drivers you are testing with are supported.   Apart from nVidia gpus, you will need to update your video drivers to enable HW acceleration.    You can get more details in the release notes for the 10.1 beta: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf    You can find out what card and driver version# you have installed by running "dxdiag.exe" from the windows start program ui, or the DOS command line.   Check the "display" tab in the application that starts up.
-chris
Flash Player Engineering.