Our goal with SlideRocket is to provide a Web-based experience that doesn’t sacrifice features found in desktop applications, so being able to deliver HD video is a huge step forward. One of the things that makes video play smoothly is assistance from the hardware, and this is something that Flash video has lacked. Until now.

The folks at Project Sinergia have provided detailed analysis of how HD will work in their June 13, 2007 and July 2, 2007 posts:

Adobe has released a new Flash Player 9 update (build 9.0.60.120) rich of performance and quality improvements expecially in video playback.
In my opinion the best improvements are:

- Multi-threaded video decoding. The VP6 video decoding will now be performed in a separate thread if a multi-core system is detected while the main thread does rendering and post processing of the video. 1080p video decoding is now possible on dual core machines.

- Full screen video decoding will leverage hardware scaling. Wonderful! why to scale a 640×480 video to 1280×1024 using the main processor when all the computer video cards today have video scaling technology? I think this is really a must for the definitive consacration of Flash Video Technology. I’ll post as soon as possible a test of this feature.

- VBL in fullscreen. The player is now capable to syncronize the rendering in fullscreen to the “vertical blank” for a smooth playback of flash movies.

- Automatic Mipmap for scaled videos and picture. Optimal for video thumbs

- Faster Vp6 entropy decoding and improved deblocking filter.

And

Now Flash has a very effective Full Screen mode. In my tests, the Full Screen Playback of 720p footage on a 22” monitor (1680×1050) has been performed around 30% faster by a dual core machine (Core 2 Duo).

What does this mean for SlideRocket? It means we’ve taken a huge step forward in our ability to deliver the best possible presentations.

- mike

ps – we’re getting closer to the day when you can play with it…we promise.