Does anyone have experience of getting hardware acceleration to work with either HTML5 or Flash video in Firefox or Chrome?

My media centre is a 1Watt Atom processor with nVidia ION graphics. It can play H264 HD video in Media Player Classic under XP with about 1% CPU, but it struggles with iPlayer and Youtube at anything above 360p.

I've experimented with the HTML5 option on Youtube but it's even more processor intensive than Flash, which was a terrible disappointment.

Flash 10.1 is supposed to have hardware acceleration, but I can't make it work on either Youtube or iPlayer. The iPlayer and Flash forums are full of threads complaining that the beta release worked, but the general release does not work now with iPlayer due to a f*cked up interlaced format now being used by the BBC.

I'm currently running XP because the Linux version of Flash seemed to be so inefficient I couldn't play video at all, but if there's a solution on any OS I'll happily change to that. I just want my ION to accelerate video in Firefox or Chrome, and I really don't care what the OS is...

Thanks.

I don't know for sure, but wouldn't who ever coded the applications (i.e. the BBC and Google) have to code it specifically for hardware acceleration??

Or is this something that Flash is supposed to do itself?

I know it doesn't work on my Macs - when I'm using the MacBook, the fans spin up as if it's preparing for take-off!

Until now, Adobe have ignored hardware acceleration in Flash. They just use the processor, so any advantages H.264 video had are lost. The same will go for HTML5 video in either Ogg or WebM (the only two that Firefox and Chrome will play). With Safari or IE 9 (when it comes out), you should be able to get accelerated video as both support H.264 video in the <video> tag.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 should include hardware acceleration, but first tests show that, while it does offer some acceleration for H.264 video, it isn't as efficient as native solutions, like Media Player.

The other problem is, not all Flash video is H.264, so even with 10.1, results will vary, depending on which codec is used.

You don't have to code the application specifically for it. In Flash 10.1, video playback is hardware accelerated when the stream meets certain criteria.

With iPlayer, the video stream is h264 and a few months ago Flash was very effective using hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, it is now broken.

There's a thread here: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/611736

Most video on Youtube is available in h264, and people do report that it accelerates just fine. I can't get it to work properly though; it accelerates 720p HD perfectly but nothing lower, which is not great since 720p does not stream fast enough and not much content is available. At the moment, the best way for me to watch 480p Youtubes is with VLC after ripping them - which reveals they are indeed h264. They judder using >60% CPU in Flash, but are smooth and only 20% CPU in VLC...

There's an explanation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTX2zs2fLUs