Why does Flash consumes so much power?

There has been serious complaints that Flash CS3 consumes huge amounts of CPU cycles, and I was wondering the same thing. There is a perfectly good reason why this is, that most people may not know.

With the surging popularity of Video content over the Internet, like YouTube, this is not due to the popularity of the Flash Player nor due to the power of Flash, but rather the power of the CODEC behind the Flash Player (the Sorenson Squeeze CODEC). This CODEC has a high compression ratio, when compressed is a small file that can be transported over the Internet with little bandwidth requirement. This makes the delivery of video content very accessible to the masses, hence the reason why YouTube took off that way it did. (They also provided an ingenious way of converting all sorts of formats to one common format)

So now you have a highly-compressed, lossy, compact file which doesn't use large bandwidth, yet there has got be a trade-off somewhere. Something has to make up for this benefit, and that is on the client-side; the end-user. When the file is received, it has to go through a decompression algorithm in order for the video to be viewed again, and that's is where the Flash Player consumes the energy.

So when you are looking at those YouTube videos, just remember, there is a lot of work that your computer is doing to display that video.

Ok, that's not the whole story. Earlier versions of Flash did not take advantage of Hardware Acceleration, due to the fact that Flash is a plug-in to your browser, and the browser is intended to use what the browser gives it as resources, and so when requiring computational power, it consumes the core CPU. It had no way of using your Video Card's Hardware, neither did it need to. Regardless, the video still requires decompression.