another cultural lesson

[rone]

If it had been Microsoft that started strangling the life out of Flash, Mac weenies worldwide would have been up in arms.  But because it's Apple, all of a sudden it's OK and part of the circle of life on the Internets.

Also, how did Robert Scoble's opinion become worthy of any modicum of respect?  The man is an affront to oxygen-breathing lifeforms worldwide.

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with the large strokes of your point here, but Microsoft did try to strangle Flash, and what they offered as a replacement was pretty much "like Flash, only owned by us!" Nobody bit. Apple is pushing an open standard that they are not the only implementer of; I'm perhaps naive enough to think that that's not a bad thing. (The ten-alarm goat rodeo surrounding format support for <video&rt; is of course another issue, but I'm at least a little sympathetic to Apple's disinterest in Open Sauce Purity: the number of video producers I've met who have any investment in or desire to construct a workflow based around Ogg Theora is precisely zero...)

Also: Fuck Adobe. Seriously. Is there anyone from MM even left in the Flash division at this point?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Probably still some people, but yes, there certainly isn't any sympathy for Adobe here. Macromedia's handling of Flash was never the smoothest, but it has certainly degraded since Adobe took over.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

the number of video producers I've met who have any investment in or desire to construct a workflow based around Ogg Theora is precisely zero...

On a related note (http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that-with-h264/), it's worth remarking that H.264 may be open, but— like Flash and just about everything else besides Theora— it is certainly far, far, far from liberation.

[eagle]

Speaking as neither an Apple weenie nor a Microsoft weenie, Flash is not inspiring me to defend it. It's proprietary, buggy, obnoxious crap that serves primarily as a way to attempt to shove more advertising down my throat. And despite all that ubiquity, after years and years of this Adobe still can't manage to produce a 64-bit native plugin that doesn't immediate segfault Firefox.

I doubt Apple's alternative is going to make me that much happier, but at least if it's just yet another broken, patent-protected video codec, I have mechanisms for handling that which are more effective than what one has to do to deal with Flash on some platform where Adobe can't make money.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

For a while, it was Microsoft AVI, and Apple QuickTIme, and RealVideo.

Now it's Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, and HTML 5.

All three of these will play the same H.264 "open but not free" formatted video (I think), but:
1) HTML 5 isn't really finished yet, and many browsers are not even ready to START implementing it,
2) Silverlight is from Microsoft, so nobody wants to get too near it for fear of radiation or something, and
3) Flash is already deployed everywhere except iPhone and iPad, because of YouTube, and "works great" if you allow for the fact that on Macs it takes up 30% of your CPU when video is NOT playing, and crashes pretty often.

DaringFireball's Jon Gruber is even more of an asshole than present company, by the way, and he likes nothing better than kicking sand in the faces of the whiners -- and recently, Adobe seems to be coping with Apple's rejection by whining to end users and tastemakers, who so far seem to be agreeing with Gruber.

And it's hard not to agree with Gruber, when you realize:
1) On Mac OS X, Flash playing H.264 takes up 10x the CPU as playing H.264 without Flash,
2) Adobe's blog showing "blue legos" on various webpages is, well, a fib: many of the pages they cite already will display H.264 without using Flash.

Then again, when the iPhone came out, and Apple announced that YouTube would be serving straight H.264 to the iPhone, THAT was REALLY when Apple cut Flash's head off. It's just taking Adobe a while to figure out what happened.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

As Gruber admits, point #1 (H.264 playback) is because Apple doesn't expose any API that can be used by Flash to get hardware accelerated video decoding (which native H.264 on Mac, and Flash on Windows, both use). So, point #1 is largely begging the question. If Flash sucks on the Mac because the Mac is Flash-hostile already, then that's just Flash sucking on the Mac because Apple is already Flash-hostile.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

As our mutual pal Anthro says, if the idea is to play H.264 with hardware acceleration, it looks like a very small piece code calling QTKit will do it.

Indeed, a few moments of asking developer.apple.com yielded:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/QTKitApplicationTutorial/Introduction/Introduction.html

But I hardly know how to use this stuff, so maybe I'm missing something.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

I've heard much the same thing from sources I will not identify publicly.

However, let me say this: if there is a reasonable way that Apple might go around Adobe to make Flash on Mac OS X use hardware acceleration without requiring modification of its installation products, then I'd very much like to know what it is. Seriously. Email me at my work address.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

re: 2), i'm pretty that sure my employer doesn't count as "nobody".

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

s/body /body sane /;

My condolances for picking a sucky employer.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Laugh all you want, but Silverlight does a very shiny job with movie streaming, which you'd know if you lived in a civilized country.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I know next to nothing about Flash and Silverlight, but (as one who refuses to use anything else from MS if I can possibly avoid it) I can testify that Netflix streaming > Hulu streaming on my Macs, for whatever pitiful little that's worth.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

It does, and I won't deny it.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

Sorry to slight them accidentally.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Heh, not at all. I just don't think that it's common knowledge that Silverlight is what Netflix uses for streaming movies; i certainly didn't know before starting here.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

I know, because I had to fucking install it.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your business!

[bryant]

I noticed, and it was worth installing it for Netflix streaming.

[crisper.livejournal.com]

Another vote for "I know because I had to install it". But, admittedly, Silverlight hasn't fucked me in the eye-sockets yet.

[fanf]

Is "many browsers" more than just IE?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Youtube's HTML5 page (http://www.youtube.com/html5) says:

Right now we support browsers that support both the tag in HTML5 and the h.264 video codec. These include:

• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari (version 4+)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed

So i think that means only Firefox is lagging behind among the major browsers (and IE, officially).

[crisper.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the Firefox crowd is throwing their weight on the pro-Flash side of this fight.

[crisper.livejournal.com]

And now YouTube's HTML5 transition has moved from "speculative beta" to "supported player" - the timing of that announcement being anything but coincidental, given who owns them.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Given its persistent flakiness and atrocious browser integration I'll be glad to see the death of Flash no matter who is responsible.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Flash is *the enemy*, and not supporting it is *the only proper course of action for sane beings*.

The fact that Apple is also not supporting it is gravy.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I agree that Flash should die, but that doesn't mean I want to stand in front of the guys shooting at it and cheer. Any Internet device with a screen the size of the iPad's, I expect to be able to browse the web on without compromises, and evil evil Flash is a necessary evil evil on far too many web sites for me to put up with its non support.

[dagon.net (from livejournal.com)]

I'm surprised so much of the talk is about video playback. That part seems boring. I'd assumed the problem that Apple has with Flash (and Java and probably Silverlight) is that it's too powerful, in the software sense.

Anything that can be used to write non-approved applications and deliver them via a non-censored/taxed channel is a serious threat to the platform revenue stream.

untaxed

[skippy-fluff.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's the revenue that's the issue here. Apple doesn't want to allow applications on the iPhone that provide such an easy, no-jailbreak-required source of games and content that doesn't pass through its portal. Apple wants the recurring revenue off its gadgets far more than it wants larger number of gadgets to be sold, so they are willing to slough off the people who won't buy the phone without Flash. They figure those users would have had a substantially lower ROI in any case.

I always figured the sucking on the desktop macs was a combo of lowering expectations in re: flash for one of their fan bases and the legacy of shifting underlying processors, but I have no data to back either up.

Typed on my shiny, glossy Mac.

Re: untaxed

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

That's about what it looks like to me too.

Re: untaxed

[wisn.livejournal.com]

If that was true, there wouldn't be a Kindle app for the iPhone. Except that there is. Apple does in fact make most of their money on hardware sales - the iTunes store is profitable but is not their primary revenue stream.

Your options for Flash for any phone in the U.S. is very limited (http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices/handsets.html#kyocera) - no smartphones, only a couple flip phones. Only Flash Lite 1.1 is available, with limited ActionScript compatibility, so most of what you want Flash for on your phone doesn't exist.

Adobe's been pushing Flash hard for the mobile platform, but the smartphone makers in the U.S. market aren't biting and won't.

Lots of people love dumping on the iPhone for the lack of Flash, but you can't get it on any phone running Windows Mobile, Android OSes, or on any BlackBerry. Flash is too bloated for any of their systems, and all the players have better angles on how to provide interactive content; Apple, Google and Palm are pushing HTML 5 hard, Microsoft has Silverlight, and all of them would just as soon you make apps built on their native APIs and avoid the burden of running apps in apps.

So thanks for playing. Next time, try speculating why Java isn't supported on these smartphones either. I'm sure it's a vendetta of some kind, so get digging.