Devs can now tap into hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 video on Macs

Apr 23, 2010 13:10 GMT  ·  By

Michael Tsai, a Mac software developer, has found that Apple opened some APIs for developers looking to tap into hardware-accelerated video. It is exactly what Adobe wanted, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber signals. Apple’s stance on Flash (a CPU hog) is likely to be unchanged. Having lost one battle with Apple, it will be interesting to see if Adobe will have the motivation to make the best of this window.

A technical note from Apple, published on March 29, describes how third-parties can now access hardware acceleration of H.264 video on the Mac, Michael Tsai points out. “This reference describes the Video Decode Acceleration framework available on Mac OS X 10.6.3 and later with Mac models equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M,” Apple says over at the Developer section of its site.

“The Video Decode Acceleration framework is a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. It is intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames,” the company adds, and proceeds to list the advantages of employing this framework, which is available on Mac OS X 10.6.3 and later.

- Create a VDADecoder object which functions as the interface to hardware decode resources. - Provide an output callback to receive a decompressed image buffer once decoding is complete. - Pass in H.264 compressed video frames, one at a time to a VDADecoder object for decode. - Cancel decompression of all non-decoded frames currently in flight. - Destroy a VDADecoder object releasing hardware resources.

TUAW has posted an interesting report in reference to this finding, saying, “Apple throws Adobe a bone -- on the Mac.” The site outlines that Adobe's Flash Player has never quite achieved the performance it needed on Mac OS X, something that Apple’s CEO allegedly cannot stress enough. Steve Jobs reportedly called the Flash makers lazy, although, at the time, Adobe might not have had everything it needed to make its platform better on request. Well, according to TUAW, developer Michael Tsai, and Apple pundit John Gruber, now it does.