Flash 10.1 adds hardware video playback to Intel GMA 500 netbooks

Adobe has released a new beta version of Flash Player 10.1 that expands support for improved Flash video playback on netbooks.

Flash Player 10.1 beta 3 now includes support for hardware acceleration of H.264 video decoding on the Intel GMA 500 graphics chipset, as used on Intel Atom-powered netbooks like the Sony VAIO X Series.

Accelerated hardware decoding for netbooks with the GMA 500 chipset only works under Windows 7 with version 5.2.1.2020 (8.14.10.2020) of the Intel GMA 500 driver — you can see if your netbook is up-to-date by running the online check at www.intel.com/support/graphics/detect.htm.

The Intel GMA 500 graphics chipset isn’t used as widely as the GMA 950 chipset in netbooks, but this latter chipset lacks onboard support for hardware video decoding. So, barring some minor performance tweaks for processor-based video decoding, Flash video performance on most current netbooks will always be below par.

Adobe Flash 10.1 is also available for smartphones and, after Apple’s reasons for resisting its support on the iPad and iPhone were apparently leaked, there’s been some debate about its impact on battery life.

A video showing Flash 10.1 strutting its stuff on the Google Nexus One popped up on FlashMobileBlog recently, and some pundits pointed out that the device’s battery status indicator seemed to drop noticeably over the course of the short demo.

This vampiric power drain has been denied by FlashMobileBlog, who reckon that what you see is not what you get — it’s actually the Nexus One’s four-bar imprecise battery graphic that’s to blame. Honest.

So, FlashMobileBlog has carried out some more detailed testing on the Nexus One and now reports that battery life only drops by 6% for a 199Mb Flash video download.

By extrapolating the data, they reckon that the Nexus One’s battery should be good for around three hours of YouTube video playback with Flash 10.1. This is some way short of Google’s seven-hour figure for video playback, but this figure will be for local video, not video streamed over Wi-Fi.

We suspect we won’t know the full story about netbook and smartphone power consumption with Flash 10.1 until the final version is released, but expect to see much contradictory speculation in the meantime…

[ Adobe Flash 10.1 beta 3 via Netbooked]