Adobe finds hardware helpers for Flash

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 06:24

IT Industry - Development

"Enabling Adobe Flash Player with our industry-leading Crystal HD video technology provides an essential advantage in accessing and viewing online multimedia content," said Dan Eiref, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's consumer electronics group.

"Our Crystal HD solutions will optimize the playback performance of Adobe Flash technology based videos, at lower power consumption, paving the way for more exciting mobile Web content and entertainment experiences for netbook users."

Crystal HD is designed to display 720p or 1080p H.264 video with no frame drops or jitter, even when the CPU is fully loaded. Other formats such as MPEG-2 are also supported.

Adobe's Wadhwani again: "With 80 percent of all videos online delivered with Flash technology today, netbooks are one of the platforms that are ideal for users to experience the vast amount of rich multimedia Web content on the go."

"Broadcom's low cost, high performance media processing engine for netbooks combined with Adobe Flash Player will deliver great video experiences," he added.

Intel welcomed the announcement. "We are pleased to see industry partners like Broadcom innovating and developing solutions around the Intel Atom processor," said Noury Al-Khaledy, Intel's general manager of netbook and nettop platforms.

Last month, Adobe announced that it had extended the Flash platform to deliver HD Flash video and applications to Internet-connected TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other devices. The Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home is already available to manufacturers, and the first devices using the platform are expected to ship in the second half of 2009.