Reason why ZHD will NOT have Flash.

[snanime]

I am an owner of ZuneHD and love it, although I wish it had Flash so I can view youtube, etc. Here is the main problem I see why Microsoft will not release flash support for ZHD even though it is very simple thing to add. We all need to blame one thing, Silverlight. If Silverlight wasn't arround, chances are we would get Flash but since Silverlight is in competition to Adobe's Flash, it would be very embarassing/ not a smart business move on Microsoft's behalf to implement Flash in Zune HD. Again I HOPE I AM WRONG AND WE GET FLASH.

OR

My Understanding of Silverlight is not so thorough to know it's technicalities. What would be really cool if Silverlight can play .flv's, .swf (flash formats). Just like OpenOffice can open MSWORD files, etc, if Silverlight can do that, it would be incredible. So, on that note there is a chance we might get flash playing ability on Zune HD, but definitely NOT Adobe Flash, maybe from Silverlight (if it is ever released on the device). Once again, I hope my prediction is wrong and we all have flash

[CrowdAds]

[roguemat]

Hey, Silverlight is a pretty awesome platform, I would choose it over flash to develop on anyday. Wish the adoption rate was greater though.

[JoshRead]

Uhh, I don't think that's true at all. Microsoft knows that most online streaming media is done through Flash. If they aren't already trying to get Flash on there, I'm sure they would like to.

Originally Posted by VagabonDOOM

Yeah...but silverlight isn't support either... So...

And that.

[VagabonDOOM]

Yeah... but silverlight isn't supported either... So...


K. Bai!

[medion]

There are some more realistic "obstacles" to getting Flash working on the Zune HD. I call them obstacles, because they're not guarantees one way or the other.

-The Zune HD has only 128MB of RAM, or half of the average smartphone released today, with Flash being a very memory intensive application
-There is a royalty fee to pay to have it on your mobile platform, which MS may not want to pay for a device that isn't connected as much as the ZHD
-The browser already has some performance issues when in desktop mode. Adding flash would bring it to a crawl

[weedalin]

Originally Posted by medion

There are some more realistic "obstacles" to getting Flash working on the Zune HD. I call them obstacles, because they're not guarantees one way or the other.

-The Zune HD has only 128MB of RAM, or half of the average smartphone released today, with Flash being a very memory intensive application
-There is a royalty fee to pay to have it on your mobile platform, which MS may not want to pay for a device that isn't connected as much as the ZHD
-The browser already has some performance issues when in desktop mode. Adding flash would bring it to a crawl

The performance issues can be fixed by providing an option to enable flash for certain websites or not. And to
Are you sure it only has 128 MB of RAM? Or is that the RAM for the CPU? Keep in mind that there are 8 different cores dedicated to different tasks on the Tegra chipset.
I can't say anything about the royalty fee, though.

[mster911]

Originally Posted by weedalin

The performance issues can be fixed by providing an option to enable flash for certain websites or not. And to
Are you sure it only has 128 MB of RAM? Or is that the RAM for the CPU? Keep in mind that there are 8 different cores dedicated to different tasks on the Tegra chipset.
I can't say anything about the royalty fee, though.

Hmmmm.....yup the Zune HD has a 1 gigabit Ram (or 128 Megabytes)....Even though it has the processor power I doubt if Zune HD has the Ram to run full flash (Note that I said "full flash")

BUT


I've been discussing this problem with a few tech nerd friends of mine and they say implementing flash lite wont be a problem with the Zune...and then Microsoft can give us apps for streaming videos....Better yet allow 3rd party app development and then anyone can create an app for streaming videos from any site


OR

The other option is to optimize the web browser and firmware to a very hgh extent so that full flash can be used in the web browser

[roguemat]

Originally Posted by mster911

Hmmmm.....yup the Zune HD has a 1 gigabit Ram (or 128 Megabytes)....

Um, what? A gigabyte is different to a gigabit, and neither of those equal 128MB.

[Celenet]

Originally Posted by roguemat

Um, what? A gigabyte is different to a gigabit, and neither of those equal 128MB.

A gigabit is 1/8th of a gigabyte, so 1 Gb is 1/8*1.024GB, or 128MB.

[roguemat]

Originally Posted by Celenet

A gigabit is 1/8th of a gigabyte, so 1 Gb is 1/8*1.024GB, or 128MB.

Yes, but you need to remember that bits are commonly used as measurements of bandwidth in relation to time. So you would say "My ADSL line can receive data at a rate of 4megabits per second". Which would be 512KBytes/second.

You would never say "I have a gigabit flash drive" instead of saying "a 128MB flash drive."

[mster911]

Originally Posted by roguemat

Yes, but you need to remember that bits are commonly used as measurements of bandwidth in relation to time. So you would say "My ADSL line can receive data at a rate of 4megabits per second". Which would be 512KBytes/second.

You would never say "I have a gigabit flash drive" instead of saying "a 128MB flash drive."

sorry, I am just quoting what I read on some site

[defaultluser]

Originally Posted by roguemat

Yes, but you need to remember that bits are commonly used as measurements of bandwidth in relation to time. So you would say "My ADSL line can receive data at a rate of 4megabits per second". Which would be 512KBytes/second.

You would never say "I have a gigabit flash drive" instead of saying "a 128MB flash drive."

No, in the industry, memory densities are quoted in bits. Just take a look at this datasheet here quoting the specs for the single DDR chip in the Zune. I found this chip model number from the Zune HD teardown here. Hynix offers additional densities at 128Mbit, 256Mbit, 512MBit and 2048Mbit.

The chip industry deals in bits, and chips are bought in bits, but as soon as you put multiple memory chips in-parallel on a DIMM, it's suddenly referred to in bytes (just see DRAMeXchange if you don't believe me). Must have something to do with not confusing the consumer (boy, that's impossible these days).

For consistency's sake, all devices sold to consumers are referred to in bytes, even if they don't use multiple chips in-parallel to achieve that density (like the Zune HD).

The Zune only has room on the PCB for a single chip, and they decided not to go with the 2Gbit module, so that limits it to 128MB.

[roguemat]

@defaultluser notice that I said the following "...commonly used as measurements of bandwidth..." and "...You would never say ...". Basically, "you" - the average consumer and customer will use megabits as transfer speed and megabytes as referring to storage space.

[medion]

I'm sorry, there seems to be some confusion here on memory. There is in fact only 128megabytes of RAM in the Zune HD, and it is a unified memory architecture (meaning both the CPU and GPU functions can address it at the same time).

As far as bits and bytes go. Most people these days use bytes when referring to storage, and bits when referring to bandwidth, because bits in bandwidth and bits in storage refer to two completely different things. However, in terms of storage:

8 bits = 1 byte
1 megabit = 0.125 megabytes, or 128 kilobytes
So 1 gigabit = 128 megabytes (which is the amount in the Zune HD), and this was shown in the Zune HD teardown a few months ago.

And for the record, using Flash 10.0.x on my machine causes the browser to immediately use 20MB of extra RAM just for a frontend. Loading a Youtube video causes it to jump another 30 megabytes. That, folks, is 50 megabytes of RAM uses just to access a Flash 10 video. Adobe is talking about bringing Flash 10.1 (full) to mobile devices that can handle it. I'm sorry, but the Zune HD can not handle that without extra memory, or an absurd level of optimization.

There is, as mentioned earlier, the option of Flash Lite 3.1, which will load Flash 8, and some Flash 9 content. However, it's very choppy, even on good hardware, still uses a lot of memory, and we'd all still complain about how it's a half-arsed implementation.

With all of that said, I personally believe that we will not see Flash support on the current version of the Zune HD. However, I would be very happy if proven wrong

[vtothet]

But I thought the point of the new flash was to decrease the CPU based needs and use the GPU. So since the ZuneHD has a good one, couldn't it balance out to be fine with that amount of ram? Sure not 1080p but full flash could work.

[medion]

[quote=weedalin;419006]

Originally Posted by vtothet

But I thought the point of the new flash was to decrease the CPU based needs and use the GPU. So since the ZuneHD has a good one, couldn't it balance out to be fine with that amount of ram? Sure not 1080p but full flash could work.

You're confusing GPU speed and RAM. Using the GPU does not decrease memory usage, especially when the CPU and GPU are sharing the memory. It merely takes the processing off of the CPU, and places it onto the GPU. The memory still has to be loaded.

And this is not to insult anyone's intelligence, but here's a VERY basic exmaple of how this works. Jack and Jill are standing near a bucket full of apples. Jack is the GPU, while Jill is the CPU. Jill was previously tasked with taking the apples out of the bucket. Jack, being stronger, was just asked to help (the GPU assist being enabled). So now, the bucket empties faster. However, the bucket of apples (item in memory) was still there to begin with.

[vtothet]

But technically, couldn't it use virtual memory if needed? Im sure the ZuneHD doesn't use that much to begin with, but if you can do that page file stuff (virtual ram/memory whatever you want to call it) on windows, why not on the Zune? Being it's flash based storage it would even have faster acess times than HDD. Or am I totally out in the blue on this?

[McDougal]

Unfortunately, if the Zune only has 128MB of RAM, because flash would run better with more RAM, then this could mean that we won't have flash until a hardware refresh is released. Also, this is a very small reason, but there is a higher security risk if the player supports Flash.

[medion]

Originally Posted by vtothet

But technically, couldn't it use virtual memory if needed? Im sure the ZuneHD doesn't use that much to begin with, but if you can do that page file stuff (virtual ram/memory whatever you want to call it) on windows, why not on the Zune? Being it's flash based storage it would even have faster acess times than HDD. Or am I totally out in the blue on this?

I don't know if the ZHD does this, but I do know of one flash-based device that does it, the Nokia N900. It has 256MB of RAM, and allots up to 768MB of the available 32GB of flash memory to be used as virtual memory. This gives a max of 1GB of memory available to applications.

[mster911]

Originally Posted by medion

I don't know if the ZHD does this, but I do know of one flash-based device that does it, the Nokia N900. It has 256MB of RAM, and allots up to 768MB of the available 32GB of flash memory to be used as virtual memory. This gives a max of 1GB of memory available to applications.

Hmmm...well virtual memory is difficult at best to implement in devices such as the Zune HD, reason the OS has to support it and if you are going to bring virtual memory support to the current Zune OS, well lets just say that it'll take a lot of new coding and testing and development.......
On the N900 it was a lot easier to implement because , the Maemo OS is based on linux and linux already has support for this feature....so it was relatively simple to add support for virtual memory in the N900............


And this is just my opinion here, but I feel for real time tasks like streaming and stuff real hardware RAM is faster and better, and here the N900 has the upper hand with 256 MB, meaning when videos are being streamed , other tasks could be transferred to virtual memory will the streaming data will use the Hardware RAM.....but the Zune HD has only 128 MB of RAM that in my opinion is just barely enough..........