So what IS the official line on Flash Aversion? Resource Eating? Taking away from QuickTime?

[deckeda]

M A V I C wrote:
... CSS & HTML 5 only partially replace what Flash offers.

What additional tools would make it worthwhile to develop an alternative solution in order to have the advantages of a Flash-less online experience?

[Winston]

deckeda wrote:
Winston, if you click on the "join HTML5 Beta" link and then go play a video, it won't play in Flash. (Some restrictions, as noted on the page apply, like if the video has an ad.)

Tried it. Very marginal improvement in playback. Sound is still out of sync. Now I get a series of stills instead of more or less blocked video.

TiBook G4 667 MHz
OS 10.4.11
Safari 4.0.4

YouTube video is still pretty much unwatchable.

This wasn't the case a year or two ago.

Not happy.


- W

p.s. And it's not much better on our upgraded G4 Cube either. Strangely, YouTube plays best on our 1 GHz G4 iMac, which has much lower specs than the upgraded Cube (the iMac probably has a faster system bus).

[M A V I C]

deckeda wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
... CSS & HTML 5 only partially replace what Flash offers.

What additional tools would make it worthwhile to develop an alternative solution in order to have the advantages of a Flash-less online experience?
The biggest issue is ubiquity. There's still a significant number of people using IE6. Flash has far more ubiquity than IE7, 8, Firefox and Webkit combined. It also pretty much works the same between all those browsers. CSS doesn't even work the same between IE7 & 8, let alone 6 or other browsers.

I'm sure you might argue that's just like the Floppy, but for developers it's not. There's no alternative like the CD-ROM was to the floppy.

Plus it allows for easy porting to AIR which is becoming very popular. Flash content can also be easily authored as a standalone application.

Technically video encoded the same in Flash should perform about the same as HTML5. It would be interesting to see the differences.

CSS is only slated to have rudimentary animation. It's support for alpha transparency is very limited. 3D is currently only proposed, and at that very limited. Hundreds of millions of dollars - if not billions - are generated off of Flash games. There are hundreds of millions of people that play them. If you just kiss Flash goodbye, those people aren't just going to quit, they'll go with something that does support Flash.

Plus, there's nothing even close to Action Script between CSS and HTML5.

I'm not a fan of Flash, but the arguments I see here posted against it don't hold water.

[Article Accelerator]

M A V I C wrote:
Wow. Ok. There appears to be some misunderstandings in this thread...There isn't a Flash video codec. All Flash provides is a wrapper for third party video codecs. The problem is, the most commonly used codecs are processor intensive.

No, that isn't the problem. The problem is Flash itself. If I download a YouTube video (in H.264 format) and play it with QuickTime player, it plays perfectly. Yet, it won't play at all in Flash on the web page.

Flash is garbage.

BTW, this test is on a G4/400!

CSS & HTML 5 only partially replace what Flash offers.

What's missing?

[M A V I C]

Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
Wow. Ok. There appears to be some misunderstandings in this thread...There isn't a Flash video codec. All Flash provides is a wrapper for third party video codecs. The problem is, the most commonly used codecs are processor intensive.

No, that isn't the problem. The problem is Flash itself. If I download a YouTube video (in H.264 format) and play it with QuickTime player, it plays perfectly. Yet, it won't play at all in Flash on the web page.

Flash is garbage.
You can't use one portion of Flash to say it's all garbage. Most Flash isn't video, so citing a video example as why "Flash is garbage" isn't valid. It would be like saying you don't like Mail.app so OS X is garbage.

That said, please show me an example you've tested with. If they're both identically encoded H.264 content and they are the same content, they should be nearly identical in playback.

CSS & HTML 5 only partially replace what Flash offers.

What's missing?

I posted that above ^^

[Sam3]

Thank you for the information, Mavic. Always good to learn.

[Article Accelerator]

M A V I C wrote:
The biggest issue is ubiquity.

You're right. Flash is not available at all on 75 million touch platform devices and millions of other web-enabled mobile devices. I expect that the new iPad will boost those numbers significantly.

The change has got to start somewhere...

Plus it allows for easy porting to AIR which is becoming very popular.

Whoa! Yet another proprietary effort--from Adobe. No thanks.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-wor...rlight-291

[Winston]

M A V I C wrote:
[quote=Article Accelerator]
[quote=M A V I C]
Wow. Ok. There appears to be some misunderstandings in this thread...There isn't a Flash video codec. All Flash provides is a wrapper for third party video codecs. The problem is, the most commonly used codecs are processor intensive.

No, that isn't the problem. The problem is Flash itself. If I download a YouTube video (in H.264 format) and play it with QuickTime player, it plays perfectly. Yet, it won't play at all in Flash on the web page.

Flash is garbage. That said, please show me an example you've tested with. If they're both identically encoded H.264 content and they are the same content, they should be nearly identical in playback.
I tried a random YouTube video on my 667 MHz TiBook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjvLk-eEUU&feature=rec-fresh+div-r-3-HM

Playback on YouTube is jerky. Playback with QuickTime Player or Miro is perfect. This is not the best video as a lot of it is static and there are no faces to check voice sync, but it still proves the point.

M A V I C , AA is right on this. Flash plays back very poorly in a web browser. I don't know who to blame, but it does not work well.


- W

[macphanatic]

Adobe appears to be looking for developers to work on Flash for the iPad. My guess is that they are concerned that if they can't develop something that works on it, it may be another nail in the Flash coffin.

[M A V I C]

Winston wrote:
I tried a random YouTube video on my 667 MHz TiBook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjvLk-eEUU&feature=rec-fresh+div-r-3-HM

Playback on YouTube is jerky. Playback with QuickTime Player or Miro is perfect. This is not the best video as a lot of it is static and there are no faces to check voice sync, but it still proves the point.

Thanks! Where do I find the version you played in QT?

M A V I C , AA is right on this. Flash plays back very poorly in a web browser. I don't know who to blame, but it does not work well.


- W

ARgh. I don't know how many ways I can word this... but blasting Flash as a whole based on video playback make no sense to me. The vast majority of Flash isn't video.