About time for H.264 in renderMode=GPU?

[kaveri2]

Adobe, you have a good sense of drama. Your way of killing AIR is killing me. The video texture support is awesome and even though it was a slow process, in the end it came out of the blue. Video is your core, so in a sense the feature came many years too late, but at the same time your competitors are not there either.

It's very unfortunate for us, that we are not using direct renderMode. I believe many others are happy with GPU renderMode too. This is because direct renderMode is just a bad alternative for Unity. The #1 reason to use AIR is Flash, not AS3.

So what I'm asking is that please please please figure out a way to add H.264 feature to renderMode GPU. How hard could it be, I would assume you have figured out all details by now?

[Colin Holgate]

StageVideo works very well in GPU mode. You get hardware playback of H.264 video. It's great.

[kaveri2]

Thanks for reminding about StageVideo! It is not quite the same as video texture as it can't be transformed freely. Also masking out the background is difficult and I think there were some other issues too. I could use StageVideo for long clips that are closer to traditional video usage and continue using Video (FLV) for shorter clips that are used as textures, but currently we use more of the latter.

[Colin Holgate]

The nature of hardware decoded video is that it doesn't pass through memory that Flash can grab. So, no chance to use it as a source of textures, other than within Stage3D, which requires Direct mode.

[kaveri2]

Thanks for a good answer that I am almost willing to accept as the final answer, but I have to dig a bit deeper.

Doesn't GPU renderMode turn Sprites into GPU instructions, in similar way how Stage3D works? Especially Bitmaps are very fast so they mus be just two triangles on GPU. Why can't Video element in GPU renderMode do internally the same what happens with Stage3D's video texture?

[Colin Holgate]

As I understand it, Stage3D can be told that a given pair of triangles that are already in the GPU can use a video stream, that is already in the GPU, as its texture. With GPU mode the texture is created in the CPU, and sent as a new texture to the GPU.

Now, it may be possible to use BitmapData and update its contents, and that somehow may be quicker to get the changed image to the GPU, but you still would have had to find a way to get the video image from GPU memory to CPU memory in order to fill in the BitmapData.

By the way, DisplayList Objects sit on top of StageVideo and obscure it. There are some cases where you could place regular DisplayObjects on top of the StageVideo area, to say give the impression of the video playing inside a TV set.

I still hope that there could be a way to get Stage3D to work in GPU mode, then you could mix DisplayList objects and Stage3D video texture scenes together. That is possible to do already with Direct rendermode, but the performance isn't as good as when you are reusing symbols in GPU mode.

[kaveri2]

StageVideo is almost doable for us. Alpha we could fake (by having alpha on the overlapping content) and rotation is not often used. Masking out the background in a complex game engine is the biggest issue, but maybe there's a simple way to do it.

We already started doing tests with HTML5 and Unity and they both are horrible what it comes to video. Now after AIR 18, I started to think that AIR may still have some good years ahead, when things on the interactive video front heat up. Won't change to Stage3D though.

It's good to hear deep explanations why things are as they are. I have never understood the seemingly huge gap between Stage3D and GPU, must be because of completely different rendering engines or something like that.

So I didn't swallow your explanation and still keeping the hopes up...

[kaveri2]

Sorry for really badly phrased opening!

I left out the most important part, the request is specifically for Video element. I should have put that on the title.