Flash 10.2 Hardware Acceleration in Ubuntu Linux
Flash 10.1 provided hardware acceleration on Windows and OS X which meant you could use the GPU and not the processor to do the heavy lifting on a 1080p Flash video. This was great for Ion and Ion 2 netbooks which had a basic Intel Atom CPU but a reasonably powerful onboard Nvidia chipset. It was available for Linux but hardware acceleration did not work.
We are releasing a new fanless, Ion 2-based PC (the H2) and I'm happy to report that hardware acceleration DOES work on Flash 10.2 and Ubuntu 10.10. It doesn't work out of the box and a few tweaks are required. You can use this tutorial as a starting point. As you can see in the screenshot of this 1080p BBC clip we had CPU utilization of 25% or less on an Atom D525 CPU (2 x 1.8GHz). Without hardware acceleration this CPU would completely maxed out and you would have about 2 frames per second. With hardware acceleration active, you get smooth 1080p flash playback. Click on the photo to see the full size screenshot.