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"Again, say it with me…
I’ve been reading this blog since the beginning. I always thought you were a little condescending, but you seemed knowledgeable enough and I thought you were doing good work.However, you can say this with me: Eat shit."
The message that I take is that some companies use Flash as the wrong tool to solve a problem which I'm not interested in. I want to see videos with minimum overhead. I don't want to be bothered with ads, poor performance, poor user interfaces, poor security, ... all which I get through Flash.
(I feel it's a real failure of vision in the open-source community that there wasn't a free theora (say) plugin available for all browsers, and server-side video hosting platform, when youtube was getting started.)
"The Flash Player solves a different problem than your favorite video player." That problem is largely tracking user behavior across the internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not every video frame is encoded in RGB. actually, very few transports use that. the in-memory layout of a YUV-encoded frame is different than the one of a RGB one. it needs conversion, which implies an intermediate copy, as well as traversing a buffer that can go up to 1080 rows. most video players (and Flash on Windows and MacOS), these days, use shaders and multi-texturing to do that conversion on the GPU; it remo…
My system isn't shader capable and still playing HTML5 video tag consumes only ~30% of CPU while playing flash ~90%. There is no excuse for that - I could understand higher CPU usage, but not by factor of 3.
Ridiculous. YUV->RGB conversion + drawing a couple of things is negligibly cheap even if done in CPU. What a pathetic excuse.
Wow. A tip to anyone reading this: if you ever find yourself explaining away poor—nay, pathological—performance with anything other than ‘we made some mistakes in the past and we’re doing what we can to correct them’, please take a good hard look at yourself and consider exiting the software industry. That’s all I have to say. Edit: that wasn’t all I had to say. > What about Mac? I’m not sure but my Mac colleagues ha…
Doubly so if your product crashes even half as often as Flash. That they cannot seem to code for stability doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for speed. I heard that they refused to work with Apple to improve its performance on Mac, and that was a core reason why they got excluded from the iOS platform -- searching for this I came up with an explanation directly from Apple: "Symantec recently hig…
Here is a good analysis of that text that explains a lot on how that statement is great PR but nothing more: http://truegryc.blogspot.pt/2010/05/response-to-thoughts-on-...
Ridiculous. YUV->RGB conversion + drawing a couple of things is negligibly cheap even if done in CPU. What a pathetic excuse.
To blame that for their poor performance suggests that their YUV-RGB conversion code is among the slowest in the industry.
The message that I take is that some companies use Flash as the wrong tool to solve a problem which I'm not interested in. I want to see videos with minimum overhead. I don't want to be bothered with ads, poor performance, poor user interfaces, poor security, ... all which I get through Flash.
Given the options available to them (roughly: expensive real video platform, expensive quicktime video platform, cheap content creation platform (in the form of flash) that can do video), those companies (and let's be honest, there's really only one that matters, youtube) made a perfectly reasonable decision. You might moan about flash interfaces, but unless you're willing to pay more (or, equivalently, view more ads…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the options available to them (roughly: expensive real video platform, expensive quicktime video platform, cheap content creation platform (in the form of flash) that can do video), those companies (and let's be honest, there's really only one that matters, youtube) made a perfectly reasonable decision. You might moan about flash interfaces, but unless you're willing to pay more (or, equivalently, view more ads…
h264 has been a standard for a long time and performs very well on current hardware (many machines have hardware acceleration for it). Google has wasted terawatts of electricity due to flash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My system isn't shader capable and still playing HTML5 video tag consumes only ~30% of CPU while playing flash ~90%. There is no excuse for that - I could understand higher CPU usage, but not by factor of 3.
Are you on Linux ? That is the only plat that I see taking higher cpu usage while playing viedo in flash. Both windows and osx now play flash with little cpu usage.