Adobe Flash has taken its lumps this year with on-again, off-again feuds with Apple, Google, and most of the large tech companies in existence. Websites are pulling away from using it. Video players are switching to HTML5. The future looks gloomy for one of Adobe's staples over the years.
One of the biggest complaints is that it's considered a CPU hog. A high-quality video with vector overlay can eat up all of the processing power on an average computer. Fortunately, Flash Player 10.2 beta has a video-playback-optimized mode called Stage Video that can leverage complete hardware acceleration of the video rendering pipeline.
In other words, it's fast without burning as much juice. If John Nack at Adobe can be believed (and there's no reason not to), Stage Video can translate into a 10X reduction in CPU usage.
