It's also possible to do super inefficient things, like streaming video from a source that's a different size than what you're showing on the screen. This means that the video is being decoded on the general-purpose CPU, which is less power-efficient, and consumes resources that might otherwise be used by other processes on the system. In the instance you're describing, we're clearly not leveraging hardware acceleration. We publish documentation and guidelines for content providers on how to write a video player that leverages the dedicated graphics hardware on your computer for efficiently decoding and rendering video streams. This means that there's an old-school CPU-only way to publish video, and more modern H.264 video support, which allows us to leverage the dedicated hardware video decoder on your computer. Moreover, Flash Player pre-dates all of the modern video codecs and the widespread availability of hardware video acceleration. You can *write* a video player, in ActionScript, which Flash Player will then execute on your computer. Flash Player is a language runtime, much like Java. First things first, Flash Player isn't a video player.
