301–310 of 515 posts
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Imagine YouTube that hosts everything it hosts now, but when you click "play", opens your video player of choice and streams the video.
People had imagined and implemented that long back. They were called plugins. Thank god, media player plugins are dead.
Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…
The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data all…
Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…
MPlayer can kick the pants off of YouTube in some contexts. Likewise, MPlayer wouldn't be viable for a vast number of YouTube use cases.
I can benefit tremendously from using both Audacity and SoundCloud. Why does one have to "win?"
Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…
Youtube is an interesting choice of example, since in a way it's "just documents" - those documents happen to be video, and are surrounded by hyperlinks to other video's pages. The real achievement here was cutting through the intellectual property thicket so that everyone could have an in-browser video player in HTML5. The first site I ever saw that used Javascript to produce a useful application rather than annoyin…
Two reasons: Bandwidth and Speed. Google has contracts with most major ISP's for caching Youtube videos. This gives them access to the best CDN money can buy! No matter how awesome or powerful your current datacenter/CDN is, it still wouldn't be able to match the fetch-straight-from-the-ISP performance. Interestingly this also creates a hidden monopoly since the barrier to entry is costly.
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> Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. What exactly is incredible about YouTube today (apart from it being a huge repository of videos, of course)? That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? The new fangled DRM? That it can bring a decent computer to its knees with…
> That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? What are you even talking about? If you click on a YouTube link, a video your computer has never seen before is playing in less than five seconds, streaming over the internet. You can instantly seek to any part of the video, even if it hours long. You can speed it up to 2x, or slow it down to 0.25x, without changing the pitch of the sound.…
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It's interesting that you mention YouTube, because the thing that finally convinced me that a 'web app' could be indistinguishable from a native app was YouTube's Leanback interface (YouTube TV). Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/tv Video player functionality aside (I understand the complaints), that thing full-screened just feels like a native app.
For me, it was the Netflix web client. Feels 100% as smooth as a good native app.
You mean when they were using silverlight or now when they are using HTML5?
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No, the web means web. Internet means internet.
Those were the historical and technical divisions. Because http & https is ubiquitous and they have a defacto pass through most firewalls, the modern "web" is the "internet" as far as application interfaces are concerned. The idea of a pure separation of concepts such that http is "documents" and some other protocol on some other port is "apps" is not going to happen. All those IT departments' security teams and Cisc…
Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…
> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be som…
This is what I use instead: mplayer -fixed-vo $( youtube-dl -gf mp4 $* "$link" )
PPK ignores the original reason that the browser won so long ago though... it is the universal GUI for the Internet. We've had access to 'native' extensions for web apps for a long time (Java applets, Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc, etc), yet these things are all but dead. Eventually the Apple vs. Android war will probably go nuclear, and users will demand that things 'just work' too. If its time to revisit this conversation, then fine... but there is nothing new under the sun.