The AIRPlayer (powered by Adobe AIR) renders in real time. In other words, you can apply effects on the Video in real time if you want.
Something to note and to do:
1. Use better hardware (CPU that is). A better graphic card will not help not RIGHT NOW... BUT will help soon as Adobe, Intel and NVidea are working on a new GPU accelerated video card for Flash. Once that is out, performance for Adobe AIR will be boosted by 400%
2. Decrease the size of the srceen division, the larger the screen (i.e.: higher resolution for size of video) the greater processing is used expnonentialy (so reducing even by 10% can have big benefits).
3. Do not run multiple heavy rendering components in the same time. For example, RSS ticker is heaver processing wise than HTML component (because of the movement, slower RSS ticker is lower processing intensive than a faster Ticker). Also, png and jpg images have lower processing needs compared to swf images (swf are vectors and render in real time via CPU cycles). Also, swf animation is VERY processing intensive especially when running in high res or full screen (until hardware acceleration is available, coming in 2009 so its almost here).
4. And THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, flv are more processing intensive compared to MP4. And with both MP4 and FLV you can set the different params to increase or decrease quality while encoding the video (using super for example, you can set things like FPS, quality etc...) I will post a Video on Super.exe which will help you learn how to take advantage of conversion for better performance. Here is Super:
http://www.mediasignage.com/files/SUPERsetup.exe To conclude, once hardware acceleration is available from Adobe/Nvidia, this post will be obsolete. For now, throwing better CPU at the problem almost always solves the problem. And optimization helps alot as well, as noted above.
Regards,
Sean.
