Stage Video with the Brightcove Player

At Brightcove, we work hard to deliver the best online media experience to our customers and their users. We are therefore very excited to demo the improved video performance in our Flash video player via Adobe's recently introduced StageVideo API.  Below you can try out a Brightcove Player that uses StageVideo so that you can see the dramatic decrease in CPU utilization. In some of our tests when using Adobe’s Flash Player version 10.2 beta with our improved video player CPU utilization dropped by as much as 65%!

This first player uses the Stage Video API if you are using Flash Player 10.2:

The second player, for comparison, has the same setup but does not use StageVideo:

We have noticed that the performance increases range widely, depending on such factors as the video card used and the bandwidth available for high resolution video. The improvement is most noticeable at full-screen.

>Here's the results from some of our preliminary testing using the demo player:

StageVideo improves video playback by taking advantage of the GPU on modern graphics cards for the display and scaling of video, thereby decreasing CPU utilization. This work builds on Adobe's previous effort to add hardware acceleration for the decoding of H.264 video in Flash. StageVideo will allow for high resolution videos to be delivered more smoothly to all. We hope eventually to see the largest performance increases on mobile devices and other less powerful units as Flash 10.2 becomes available in many places.

The demo player above uses the StageVideo API when Flash Player 10.2 is detected. Everything that is normally available can be used within this player: the full power of Brightcove’s declarative XML language, BEML, hundreds of API methods, and a rich plugin ecosystem.  It is only a demo, with wide availability of the usage of StageVideo coming later. Stay tuned!