People on this world: If flash videos on your mac have been slow in the past, it is because Apple, as a closed and proprietary platform, didn't expose the proper API for hardware video acceleration and thus, Adobe wasn't able to use hardware acceleration! This is not Adobes fault!
Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's extremely superficial to just blame Adobe.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-acceler...
From my point of view it is obvious that video playback could be faster if Adobe had access to hardware acceleration. We can agree on that point, right? This is obviously Apples decision to make an API public or not. Of course, i am not saying that video playback couldn't be smooth in software mode. The point that mplayer plays almost everything and smooth on different hardware is a good point. But to pass the buck to Adobe all the time is just wrong. I mean, the API is now public and Adobe already has built in the hardware acceleration, that is quite fast and shows that they are doing something to address the problem.
Obviously my opinion seems to upset others, so i should have just shut up and let people brag about how bad Adobe is. I'm not using a Mac, i am not developing with Adobe tools and i have no problems with my flash plugin, so in the end why should i care. I just hate one-sided views.
(fyi, i wish that flash video dies, too, as much as everyone)