Adobe: HTML5 Will Throw the Web 'Back to the Dark Ages of Video'

http://seekingalpha.com/article/186064-adobe-html5-will-throw-the-web-back-to-the-dark-ages-of-video

by profquail • 16 years ago

15 29 16 years ago

seekingalpha.com

hyperbolist3• 16 years ago

http://jilion.com/sublime/video -- a Video player for these approaching Dark Ages

KWD• 16 years ago

That returns 'Browser not Supported' in Firefox.

tolmasky3• 16 years ago

I go to that site with Firefox and it tells me my browser is not supported. Firefox.

This is precisely his point, web video used to be like this. "Firefox support is in the works". People are past the point where they need to have something "in the works" to do something as simple as showing their audience a video.

I am the biggest open web advocate you will find, but I don't see why its necessary to lie about the current state of affairs. HTML5 video is not ready for prime time. Will it be at some point? Of course. But pretending it is today is silly and distracts from fixing its obvious failings. The need to encode your video into multiple formats is a big deal, the fact IE doesn't support it at all is a big deal, the question of how to insert dynamic ads reliably into videos for people like Hulu is a big deal. Not to mention its still pretty darn buggy. The idea that Flash became useless yesterday is a joke.

sumeetjain• 16 years ago

I don't think anyone is claiming that "Flash became useless yesterday".

hyperbolist was just offering an example of good-looking video via HTML5 to counter the claim that a world without Flash is a world in the dark ages of video.

sp332• 16 years ago

This isn't about just playing video. This is about integrating video into the web instead of leaving it partitioned in a plugin somewhere. None of my Firefox extensions can interact with Flash video (except AdBlock which just removes it from the page). On the other hand, you can use javascript and canvas to do really cool things with video in the browser.

Examples:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/add-ambiance-to-your-videos...

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/connecting-html5-video/

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/pop-art-video/

and the same with audio:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/exploring-music-audio/

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Will it be at some point? Of course.

You don't understand. Yesterday, the fact that Firefox didn't support the video was "something that will be fixed one day, who knows when, maybe before 2020". Today, it is a big bug which needs to be addressed ASAP.

People don't compare managing software projects to herding cats just to be cute. Getting everyone to pull in the same direction really is 90% of the job. You need to start a stampede.

(The classic way to get programmers stampeding toward an actual product? Threaten to ship the product. Then, carry out that threat.)

The position of the players has not changed. But the second derivative has changed, and the first derivative will follow...

MikeMacMan• 16 years ago

On Safari, that link pinwheeled my MacBook Pro for about 10 seconds

StrawberryFrog• 16 years ago

Or will HTML 5 consign Adobe to the dark ages?

sailormoon• 16 years ago

I don't know why Adobe's clinging to Flash so tenaciously anyway. They can't make that much money from it and it always seemed a little tangential to their core competencies of making graphics/DTP software. It's not like they put a lot of effort into it or anything; it has sucked, badly, for years.

Let it go, Adobe. All things must end.

mbreese• 16 years ago

After looking briefly at their 2009Q4 conference call transcript, they reported "Platforms" (Flash) revenue at around $47 million and "Creative solutions" (photoshop, etc) around $430m out of ~ $750m total. I'm not sure if you can cleanly separate out how much Flash is worth to them, since I'm sure part of that Creative solutions revenue is for Flash authoring tools.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/q409Script...

mrclark4112• 16 years ago

Agreed. No one pays for the flash player, so who cares what the player is. Just become the best at content creation. There will always be a huge market for creating all of what flash does today.

kevingadd• 16 years ago

I'm all for the dark ages if it means I might finally get vertical synced video playback (which even Flash 10 still cannot do, so I get to enjoy obvious screen tearing in hulu, youtube and amazon videos).

The fact that Adobe continues to ignore details like vsync makes me wonder if they even know what a good video playback experience would look like.

maxharris• 16 years ago

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1096474

awa• 16 years ago

To quote what Adobe exactly said: "Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

Ofcourse saying "Back to the dark ages of video due to incompatibility issues" in headline doesn't generate clicks.

dirtbox• 16 years ago

While Flash is pretty awful, I think it's plain the only reason Apple doesn't want it on their devices is because it allows for functionality that Apple don't want you to access without you paying them. http://listen.grooveshark.com/, for example, completely voids any reason to pay for music over iTunes. Not to mention the thousands of games and other content that offers an alternative on their proprietary store front hardware.

frozendevil• 16 years ago

Yes, because there're aren't Last.fm and Pandora apps, not to mention thousands of games, for free in the app store. The app store that comes free on the hardware. And I totally bought every singe one of the 9,358 songs in my library from the iTunes store.

Say what you want about Apple's approval policies or how the iPad is going to kill babies because it's closed, but the lack of flash is clearly a performance/user experience decision over a political one.

duskwuff• 16 years ago

And a lot of Flash games wouldn't be playable on the iPhone anyway, because they assume (1) a keyboard, (2) a mouse cursor, and/or (3) multiple mouse buttons -- none of which the iPhone has, or can easily emulate.

rubymaverick• 16 years ago

Adobe could fix almost all of this by open sourcing the Flash Player. http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Projects

hyperbolist3• 16 years ago

http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/winer_flash_open_standards

quote: But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.

wglb• 16 years ago

And according to a blog of one of the flash development team working on moving it to 64 bits, there is also a lot of asm there.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

I'm not so sure about things like vector graphics animations, but I'd be willing to bet that Flash has lost online video with HTML5. About time too. Flash is a plague of the modern browser and I will be happy when I'm rid of it (Click2Flash already does most of that). Google/Youtube HTML5 HD H.264 is amazing. What used to take up 95% of a core in Flash now takes 2%. Here's what I have to say about Flash: good riddance.

mrclark4112• 16 years ago

Is there an HTML5 alternative to vector graphics? Even if HTML5 take down flash video, will we all still have the flash plugin for games and other interactive uses?

(or will we just write all that crazy stuff in the new javascript libraries: http://raphaeljs.com/scape/)

Semiapies• 16 years ago

SVG?

bartl• 16 years ago

Uh, SVG?

benkant• 16 years ago

They have a point, but it's more Mozilla (and Microsoft's) fault than anyone else's.

headShrinker• 16 years ago

Adobe Flash is simply not a viable option. period. http://fritzw.com/media/misc/flash2.jpg

Adobe: HTML5 Will Throw the Web 'Back to the Dark Ages of Video'

Related Stories