Flash performance on CNN Live is superb

[vcsx]

How is that possible that the CNN Flash player is so well developed that, even playing a video in fullscreen, it beats the performance of Hulu or YouTube in normal screen? If there's a way to develop Flash without hogging the system, why doesn't everybody do it?

http://live.cnn.com

I noticed that several months ago (before the first 10.1 beta came out), but finally decided to ask about it. And no. It has nothing to do with that app (Octoshape Grid Deliverence) the site tries to install to your browser. I have always said "No" to that dialog-box and the playback is flawlessly, nonetheless. Is that really Flash?

 

[Crusty]

Without knowing the codecs and compression rates they are using it's hard to pin performance down on video players. CNN could be using a very light codec and low resolution, while youtube will use h264 and higher compression.

 

[vcsx]

But even the simplest YouTube codec takes a lot more resources than the CNN video. Try it yourself. Add &fmt=? to the end of a YouTube URL and see how low-rez the video is. such video in normal screen would be a lot heavier than a CNN video played in fullscreen.

 

[Crusty]

What I'm saying is that even in this case you still do not know the exact codecs, resolution and bit rates of the files to compare against. If one is using h264 in software and the other is using some basic MPEG-2 codec in software there's obviously going to be a difference in CPU usage.

You could also have differences if one is doing the scaling to fullscreen in software and the other is offloading to your video card.

 

[Pretty Cool]

Even though you did not install Octoshape, it seems like that is still the delivery system and not Flash. Before the big-name/big-bucks Flash video sites came out, the way to get relatively smooth streaming was via p2ptv.