Can You Get Flash Without Adobe? Meet DivX Plus Web Player

Features
By Andrew Ku
published

DivX Plus Web Player is the first alternative to Adobe's Flash Player. It promises better performance, battery life, and video quality, all in one shot. If Flash content brings your computer to its knees, read on to find out if DivX is the answer.

Do Browsers Matter?

Does Your Browser Matter?

Remember that there are two Flash plug-ins. There’s an ActiveX version written specifically for IE8 and another one for every other browser. The same applies for the DivX Plus Web Player, with one major difference. The non-ActiveX plug-in supplied by DivX is only compatible with Firefox. HiQ doesn't work with Opera 11, Safari 5, or Chrome 10. Also, note that we're testing with Firefox 3.6. Mozilla recently released Firefox 4.0, but it's incompatible with DivX Plus Web Player.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
DivX Plus Web PlayerAverage CPU UsageWindowed Playback: ASRock E350M1Aero Enabled, Hardware Acceleration EnabledYouTube 1080pYouTube 720pYouTube 360p
IE8 32-bit: 8.0.7600.168545%27%15%
Firefox: 3.6.1573%49%35%
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Adobe Flash PlayerAverage CPU UsageWindowed Playback: ASRock E350M1Aero Enabled, Hardware Acceleration EnabledYouTube 1080pYouTube 720pYouTube 360p
IE8 32-bit: 8.0.7600.168577%32%21%
Firefox: 3.6.1530%30%29%

Browsers do matter. In fact, the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox is much greater than what we've see with Adobe Flash Player. This isn't a pure DivX versus Adobe duel. It's a matter of pairings. Adobe and DivX each have two separate plug-ins, which makes for a four-way fight. When played in a window, Adobe Flash Player and Internet Explorer generally win.

We noticed that 1080p in IE8 seems to break hardware acceleration support. We’ve occasionally seen this isolated anomaly with Flash at higher resolutions.

Our Sandy Bridge-based system sees little difference between browsers, but we would expect to see performance variance minimized given this platform's more potent processor. On older systems without hardware-accelerated decoding, like the first-gen Centrino, the difference between two software configurations can even manifest itself in crashes. For example, on our Atom-based netbook, we found it difficult to properly load DivX with Firefox. The HiQ plug-in stalls whenever it tries to load the Flash file. With Internet Explorer, DivX crashes whenever it tries to load high bit rate video. In our case, IE8 refused to correctly load any 1080p YouTube video.

Clearly it seems that on low-power systems, DivX doesn't mix well with Firefox. Internet Explorer is your best bet.

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Andrew Ku
19 Comments Comment from the forums
  • henydiah
    one of challenges of adobe flash player, i hope this can support my mobile
    Reply
  • The Halo Don
    Useful! I'll take it!
    Reply
  • Does not work in chrome
    Reply
  • so according to the title, divx can do the same funcionality as a whole, regarding flash plugin?

    can it be programmable, you can make animations, games, applications with divx player?


    or does the text admit that flash is only about video? so adobe is pushing a whole software just to play video on browsers?


    to the dear writer of this report, please understand that tom´s hardware is a long standing website, and it conquered the credibility of millions of people around the world, so be more carefull next time you wanna write a sensationalist title to bring people to your text.


    flash does a lot more than playing video. and there´s no such thing as "flash video"... video is VIDEO, no matter played by flash, html5, "bleep-blam-bloom technology", whatever else.

    and the day you have so many calculations and big chunks of scenery, characters, audio, and server liasons, you´ll have an impact in the system, no matter if its flash, html5, or anyother app.

    magic doesnt happen out of flash. data weights anyway it comes, and theres no guarantee that producers are the best for their jobs, by working with optimizations in many levels of production.

    simply theres no guarantee at all, so expect a heavy ugly bad optimized html5 applications in the future, that will impact on browser´s performance anytime sooner or later.
    Reply
  • Soul_keeper
    I'm not impressed
    adobe may suck, but divx isn't much better as far as openness goes.

    Star Trek on cbs is an absolute annoyance to watch ...
    My gnash plugin don't work there
    Reply
  • dark_lord69
    mayankleoboy1i wont use IE8 instead of FF to save any amount of battery.Why not use IE9? Toms found it to be one of the fastest browsers...
    Yes, IE 8 is slow...
    Reply
  • gm0n3y
    While its great to have an alternative to flash, without support for the latest browsers (IE9, FF4, and most importantly for me Chrome) its not going to spread very far.
    Reply
  • ph0b0s123
    Wow, what a puff piece. About that software came out over 6 months ago. Even the graph which is supposed to show how much better this software is for playing flash shows that CPU utilisation is the same if not worse than without. The article did also not mention that most have binned this version of divx player and gone back to older versions due to the amount of crashes the software causes in browsers. Cannot believe 6 pages was spent on this.

    And while I am complaining, cause normally I love the site, it's very annoying that comments I leave on the UK site don't appear on the US site, and visa versa. Can understand when a site is in a completely different language but Brits and Yanks can talk to each other yer know.
    Reply
  • computertech82
    It's an article i already know about, but i've found divx CRASHES by ie8 browswer. While an OLDER version, doesn't.
    Only if they fix the program to run stable, will i use it. I don't need something that doesn't work most of the time.
    Reply
  • People still use Internet Explorer?

    mayakleoboy & ph0b0s123: +1 and +1
    Reply