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Today I experimented with the new stageVideo, which is available since Flash Player 10.2. It is a very nice technique, where the video is rendered through a pipe by the gpu. So the cpu consumption is quite 10 to 20 percent playing a full HD video instead of 50 percent or more. Even it reduces the energy consumption.
On a mobile chip-set like the Tegra from Nvidia the video playback should be very smooth in theory.
Adobe has announced this technique at the Adobe Max last year. In January Adobe said it would be available with Android 3.0.
So I thought it would be the right time to check it out now on my Galaxy Tab 10.1v.

But surprise:
No stageVideo is available in Flash Player 10.3 on Android 3.0.1.
No stageVideo is available in Adobe AIR 2.6 on Android 3.0.1.
And last but not least no support of stageVideo in Adobe AIR 2.7 on IOS.

What happened?

Adobe has quite updated the release informations for stageVideo.

At this developer FAQ (modified 28 March 2011):

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/optimization_features_fp101.html

And at this site too (modified 4 April 2011):

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/mobile_video_encoding.html

Adobe informs, that stageVideo would be available with Android 3.0.1 …

But at this shortly updated main site (tab mobile features):
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/features/
Adobe told us, that the stageVideo would be not available until Android 3.1.

Hardware-accelerated video presentation (requires Android 3.1)

Enjoy beautiful, smooth playback of high-definition H.264 video content powered by Adobe® Flash® technology across the web in both embedded and full-screen mode using Android™ tablets with Android 3.1, like the Motorola XOOM. Adobe Flash Player leverages the Stage Video hardware-accelerated video pipeline to provide higher frame rates and less power consumption, building on the efficiency of hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding.

Note: Hardware-accelerated video presentation support will only be available with Android 3.1 and is not supported on earlier versions of Android.

I like the note *irony*.

What a pity and what a great way of communication.

Thanks Adobe.

I hope stageVideo will be truly supported on Android 3.1. At this time I can not test it, because I have no Android 3.1. Playing a h264 video with cpu based rendering is quite a pain.

And by the way: should not Flash Player 11 released in mid 2011?

[Update]

Today I updated my Galaxy Tab 10.1v to Android 3.1 with Flash Player 10.3.185.25 … also no stageVideo support. Can somebody confirm this with other devices?

Testlink is:
http://d-ssl.de/svTest/

Player is based on OSMF 1.6.

Code to check stageVideo support:

try {
console.appendText( “availabe stageVideo pipes: “+stage['stageVideos'].length+”\n” );
} catch(e:Error) {
return;
}
for( var i:int; i < stage['stageVideos'].length; i++ ) {
if( stage['stageVideos'][i].videoWidth > 0 ) {
console.appendText( “pipe “+i+”: video size: “+stage['stageVideos'][i].videoWidth+”x”+stage['stageVideos'][i].videoHeight+”\n” );
}
}

A few weeks ago I did the mistake (?) and upgraded to Flash Builder 4.5. At first to say, the product is nice, but the Eclipse bugs are niggling. But a thing I can do not understand is:

Why Flash Builder 4.5 only supports the Flex SDK 4.5?

For myself as a developer who has some long time projects, this is a frustrating point. If you are working on a big project you can not simply switch to a new SDK, ony why Adobe think it is great. You have to make some pretests to be sure that is working very fine.

Believing in Adobe, which is sometimes the biggest mistake what I can do, I simply upgraded a bigger business project to the 4.5 Flex SDK.

First I was struggling about some changes in the AIR descriptor file. Updating the name space is a simple part, but finding out why it has problems with the version-tag takes some time. Afterwards I was smarter and did know, that with AIR 2.6 the version-tag was changed to “versionNumber”. Really ease to change, but beware of the things behind:

The changing from version to versionNumber is not a simple wording change, it is the evolution to the knew AIR 2.6 update process. A thing, which I did not found at the release notes.

For this new update process you have to update your complete update-implementation, and this is a 2-steps-process, because at first you have to provide an small update, which make it possible for your application to use this new update process. After this step it is possible for you to provide application updates, which are based on Flex 4.5. If a user is not using the app for a long time, they will get two updates short behind.

I think for myself Adobe should make a better communication of ugly problems like this. In the tech-notes, the Adobe technicals for there self wrote, that this process is not simple.

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/873/cpsid_87300.html