FlashPlayer 10.2 is coming on Android

Adobe announced today, during the Mobile World Congress, that Flash Player 10.2 will be available soon for Android Devices. This is very important because FP 10.2 introduced the Stage Video object which offers a direct control over hardware acceleration in video deconding. In my opinion the worst point of weekness of FP10.1 for Android is the performance of video deconding so I’m very happy of having Stage Video ASAP.

In Flash Player 10.1 for Android the decoding of H.264 can be hardware accelerated (depending by the HW of the device) but the color conversion, the blending and the compositing of the video on the display is still demanded to a software layer. This is because the canonical Video object is part of the display list and so it injected inside the display list rendering pipeline. Stage Video is a alternative way to access video layer and it is not part of the display object. At the cost of a lower flexibility you have a direct access to harware acceleration, from bitstream decoding to video compositing.

Stage Video will be available only on Android 3.0, this means tablets like Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and so on. The need for full hardware acceleration is much more important for a tablet which has a big screen compared to a smart phone but I suppose we will see even new smart phones equipped with Android 3.0 any time soon.

Now I feel only the need for a new, efficient and accelerated iOS packager…

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