[karma-lab]

I have several Windows Machines (XP, 2KP), and several Macs (OS 9, OS X 10.3.9).

I have created .flv video files, and a flash video player. Using Flash 7 Players, Flash MX Pro 2004. I used Squeeze 4.1 to convert from QT files to .flv, encoding a data rate of 15 fps and about 1000 kbps.

It works great on Windows, terrible on the Mac (when deployed on the internet). The main problem seems to be that the frames per second rate (which is encoded at 15 fps in the Flash Files) cannot keep up on the Macs. I'm using NetConnectioon and NetStream classes to playback. With NetStream, there is the ns.currentFps property that you can watch to see what the current fps playback rate is.

But these are not necessarily slow Macs. The Windows machines are not amazingly fast either. Yet they consistently keep up at about 15 fps, and the whole experience just works, while the Macs have a hard time playing 12 fps, and keep dropping down to 4-5 fps for periods of time. So the video gets completely backed up and out of sync with the audio during playback. Also, the scrubber bar and other controls I've implemented seem more responsive on the Windows version.

I'm just wondering if Flash is just inherently better on Windows, if the Flash Player is just better, etc. I've noticed that creating content with Flash MX on Windows seems noticably more responsive than running the same program under Mac OS X.

All my experiments so far seem to indicate that Flash video and animations just playback choppy on Macs, and smoothly on Windows. Anybody know anything about this?