Tag Archive for 'flv'

Difference of Video played with hardware support vs. non hardware support (”FLVPlayback bug pt2″)

Published on March 2, 2008 in Flash and video. 0 Comments

I thought it would be interesting to show you what video is like with and with out hardware support in the flash player. My need to look for the difference came after finding out that video is not always playing at it’s full potential if you use the StageDisplayState class with your FLVPlayback component as I discussed here.

What I found is that the hardware support helps the video by providing some anti aliasing that gives the video a nicer cleaner edge. Below I have examples that show this anti aliasing in action. The examples come from the video I have as a demo in the first part of this topic (”FLVPlayback bug pt1″) found here .

To see the difference in the video playback with and with out hardware support all you have to do is use the full screen button on the player to use hardware support or click on the stage it’s self to use the StageDisplayState class to play the video with out hardware support.

Flash video in full screen With Hardware support
with-hardware.png
flash video in full screen With out.
without-hardware.png

Here are two more examples with high res links
high res With



high res With Out
small-without.png

In the first part of this topic one of the commenting readers named Pietro provided two links to a possible solution to the bug found with the full screen mode and the flv playback component.

But as posted in the article there is a catch 22:

The FLVPlayback component includes the skinScaleMaximum property, which enables you to limit the scaling of the FLVPlayback skin when hardware acceleration is used. You may choose to limit the scaling based on the specific content that is being scaled and your aesthetic tastes regarding the appearance of large skins. Limiting the scaling of the skin, however, requires a combination of hardware and software to scale the video. In some cases, limiting the scaling of the skin can adversely affect performance on videos with large dimensions that are encoded at a high bit rate. If the video is large (640 pixels wide or more, 480 pixels tall or more, for example), you should avoid setting skinScaleMaximum to a small value—because it could cause performance problems on large display monitors

This leaves me to wonder about custom made players and if they support hardware rendering and if so how they achieved it. Such players as JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 3.15 leave me wondering if they too provide a hardware rending player.

To be continued…