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

[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.