Hardware accelerated playback in Flash Player 10.1 actually works!

Hardware accelerated playback of h.264 content in Flash Player 10.1 beta actually works!

Usually when watching any HD video on the Vimeo HD Channel my CPU would  spike to about 40-50% usage. But now, after installing Flash Player 10.1 beta on my laptop, the playback process is handled by my GPU thus leaving the CPU to attend to other tasks.

CPU usage with Flash Player 10.1 beta has dropped to about 10-20% (from 40-50%)!

For now hardware accelerated playback is only available on the Windows version of Flash Player 10.1 beta and only for h.264 video content, but it’s a great step in the right direction.