jdowdell

Player team update here, 6pm Saturday Pacific: http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/2010/02/flash_bug_repor...

Parts are (Tamarin, frameworks, Open Screen Project partnerships), but parts cannot (codecs licensed from third-parties are a key blocker).

Dave McAllister has a single-screen summary, and I've got some background history, both with plenty of links: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail... http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_for...

> I understand that this is the future and hate Flash as > much as the next guy, but I just don't understand why > we're just suddenly bashing Adobe.

I've been wondering about the recent change myself. Considering that it's not election season, it seems prudent to wonder about the sudden flood of unverifiable identities in discussion forums. Hard to tell, but necessary to wonder.

> "Or, to state it without shilling:"

We don't know that you're not shilling.

> "The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins.

Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.

On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...

"Why can't Flash make use of Quicktime?"

Then you'd have to do version-checks, if you're actually delivering content to audiences. Fewer people have it, fewer people use the current version. Most codecs on content sites are H.264 or On2 VP6 (successor to Theora). Easier to solicit Apple to open up their acceleration APIs to plugins.

<em>"The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written."</em>

You're quite incorrect.

Plugins on Mac browsers still have no API to offloading video decompression to hardware... QuickTime excepted, that is.

Kevin's stats were comparing CPU-decompression of video, which should get closer to parity.

Apple's APIs would be easier to use, were they to provide guidance and resources more like Microsoft does. Stark difference.

<em>"It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash"</em>

I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.

What I've heard (and I don't have access to Apple's source records) is that most of these failures are when the plugin requests more memory, and the browser responds ungracefully. Flash just triggered it but didn't cause it.

But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.

(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)

Sure. Most of the crashing doesn't occur in other forums, where people post with their real identities. It's only when Apple business models are threatened that we see all these "ray@gmail" and "acey@mailinator.com" come out.

If people were straight up, and focused on trying to solve a problem, that'd be one thing. Sudden swells of anonymous turfing is another. Apple won't even go on-the-record with their executive-level smears, for goshsakes... what kind of corporate culture is that?

Good point: Could you use the Sublime HTML/JS set for other codecs? Probably could -- the codec would make less of a difference to transport control functionality than the browser's varying support for JavaScript and VIDEO APIs would be.

Most people don't think it is. That's why everybody uses it.

Crashing seems to be mostly directly correlated with pseudonymous Apple-polishing on webforums.... ;-)

(btw, if you're sincerely trying to improve your own experience, there's a quick set of diagnostics here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_sta... )

Travis keeps the sites confidential, for obvious reasons. It's plausible that there was another shift in sites sampled recently, similar to the doubling that it reported for Silverlight starting one week in November: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdowdell/4180222368/

I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)

Try actually reading what was said, instead of rephrasing it according to some internal narrative.

Sounds like didn't read the linked info either.

For Maemo, see earlier on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090855

Sounds like you didn't read the comment before commenting yourself, then...?

(Noise & disinfo levels seem at all-time highs recently... Engadget may merely be the first site of many to adapt.)

Source: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home

Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.

(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)

There is no "'HTML5' VIDEO".

AAPL and GOOG can use VIDEO tag for H.264-encoded video.

Mozilla and Opera can use VIDEO tag for Ogg Theora encoded video.

There are two distinct implementations: VIDEO/H.264 and VIDEO/Theora. Neither supports the other.

You got suckered by the "'HTML5' VIDEO" talk. Not your fault; even its proponents didn't address such video basics until it became too late.

Lee does a lot of travel and presentations, working on sample files, blogging, customer interaction.

The frothiness of the "'HTML5' VIDEO" talk requires a significant amount of research to determine the reality-of-the-week.

You lie. http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Aswf+%22contrary+ev... http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/ http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/

Short phrase becomes more complex when examined... some history here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_for...

<em>"The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not having this discussion."</em>

It's much better than it was, and about to become even moreso. The major part of work over the past year has been invisible to you so far, but cross-device predictability is coming from almost every major manufacturer this year.

The Apple problems are only partly about technology.

That "Player 9.4" is a bit of an odd bird. Nokia was insistent, a few years ago, on showing the world's real webpages on a pocket device -- they were the first to want to do desktop-style browsers and plugins, rather than Flash applications or native UIs on mobile. I didn't believe it could be done, but I did use an N700 when it became available.

From what I understand, Nokia adapted an older Adobe Linux codebase to the smaller device, and implemented it as a plugin to their browser. Nokia is currently a major partner in the Open Screen Project, and is poised to take advantage of the mobile optimizations in the upcoming Player 10.1 release.

So, oddly, I'd tend to agree with the earlier poster, than we haven't seen fruits of Mobile Flash work recently. But now in Jan10, it's almost showtime.... ;-)

True on the schedules. In 2008 Flash's mobile and desktop teams merged, to create a common runtime codebase across device form-factors. The Open Screen Project has a dramatically wide range of collaborators... one of the most massive examples of cross-company scheduling I've ever seen.

Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona in February. That should be the coming-out party for the entire next generation, and shipments will ramp up through 2010.

I was one of the first people at Macromedia to talk up FutureWave SmartSketch and CelAnimator. From what I've personally seen, the innovation of the entire Flash Platform under Adobe's stewardship has surpassed even the growth under Macromedia.

You don't have to believe it. But that's what I've seen.

If you want older stats, here they are: http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.macromedia.com/software/pla...

Not classy, but then, that's what pseudonyms are for.... ;-)

(I was sort of relieved to see YouTube take the beta off... brings the conversation down from the clouds and into reality.)

Check into it more. The tagging, alone....

Sorry, I haven't heard of any progress on this yet... here's the best current guidance I've seen:

<em>"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."</em> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...

True on the framerate -- it's an upper gate. Static video which overburdens a configuration can drop frames to keep up. But interactive presentations need to display each intended frame, and so will drop framerate instead. More here: http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/05/frame-rates-in-flash-playe...

For the "why", that's Adobe Corp's tale to tell, but I haven't yet met a person inside Adobe who wouldn't be very, very happy if Mac/Win performance differences could be made to disappear.