Flash-Free Video in 2016 • Hacker News Board

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#101

Post by foodstances » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

benedikt wrote: post #18

smaili wrote: post #10

Fantastic news and congrats to the NY Times team. Does anyone know, who at this point still continues to use Flash?

Jerry Seinfeld on comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com

Only on desktop, on mobile it must be showing an MP4 file since it works on the iPhone.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#102

Post by thescriptkiddie » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:35 PM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #13

gue5t wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All closed technology, on some level, exists to perpetuate coercion. This is the thesis of the free software movement.

I think that's a rather extremist view.

It's also true. Even at the most benign level, non-free software exists to coerce you into running unverifiable code on a machine you own. Less benign non-free software coerces you into paying for a license, signing an EULA, participating in a botnet, etc.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#103

Post by art0rz » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:36 PM UTC

vxNsr wrote: post #78

dplgk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and also iTunes on Mac. And WiFi on Mac. and XCode on Mac. and App Store on Mac.

And don't forget QuickTime!! The all time worst media player.

To be fair, in the time of RealPlayer and such, QuickTime was the least bloated and best performing video player around. There really isn't a use for it in 2016, though.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#104

Post by art0rz » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

rjvir wrote: post #45

epistasis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really wasn't a Steve Jobs contribution in the least, it was Adobe. Flash on mobile was terrible, Steve Jobs may have been the messenger for that but he wasn't the decision maker.

Apple not supporting Flash was a crucial part of it's demise, though. Without that, we might be running Flash on mobile today, even though it was terrible.

They did actually support it for a while on Android, but Apple never wanted to support third party browser plugins on iOS, and since the Android port was horribly slow even on the most basic swfs and was a huge hack, Adobe decided to drop it. AIR is still supported on both platforms, though (and I hear it's quite good).

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#105

Post by guelo » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #62

sparky_z wrote: post #57

I know everybody here hates flash (for excellent reasons!) and is happy to see it die. But, as a user who doesn't work in tech, I really miss the ability to enforce click-to-play loading of videos. From my pseudo-outsider perspective, the switch to HTML5 has been really frustrating. I happen to hang out around these parts so I understand the reasons for it, but if I didn't it would probably make me mad. It would feel…

We're only happy to see it die because it was never well cared for. Flash was much heavier and much, much more insecure than it needed to be with Adobe-level money behind it. They were terribly poor stewards of the technology. I mean no offense to anyone that was on the Flash team, I am making a (flawed?) presumption that it probably didn't feel great inside the company either. Others may tell you I'm wrong - it's ab…

The real reason Flash died was not technical, it was because Steve Jobs didn't want a whole platform he didn't control running on the iPhone.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#106

Post by eldod » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

dave2000 wrote: post #98

dplgk wrote: post #23

Has anyone here that is excited about HTML5 video (and Flash being dead) ever written an enterprise video player? It's a total nightmare in HTML5. You have little control over playback and insight into video events. Meeting business requirements (that Flash fulfilled) with HTML5 video ranges from hard to not possible.

Is there any technical or legal reason why it's not as easy to handle playing video as it is to show an image, from a site developer point of view? Why can't the browser do it natively? Why does it have to be handled via JavaScript and whatever else?

Today playing a video more complex than just decode a .mp4 file: most broadcasters use Adaptive Bitrate streaming formats like HLS and MPEG-DASH, that add a lot of complexity: How do you get the qualities and languages list? how and when do you switch the video quality? etc

In case of hls.js used by the NYT, you actually need to transmux the mpeg-ts content used in HLS into fMP4 to make it playable by the Media Source Extensions API used by the browsers.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#107

Post by cpeterso » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

dayyvson wrote: post #61

mtgx wrote: post #43

And yet it still doesn't use HTTPS. Wasn't it supposed to get it by the end of last year?

We had to shift a few priorities last year, but we are working to get HTTPS support on our video player. So, stay tuned!

HTTPS is a challenge for video players because a player on an HTTPS web page must also stream video over HTTPS (to avoid HTTP/HTTPS mixed content errors or warnings), which can be costly. Flash doesn't enforce mixed content checks.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#108

Post by Etzos » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #88

cballard wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have little control over playback This sounds user-friendly. > insight into video events If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly.

> If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly. What about a slideshow which has a video of the speaker, and changes the slides for particular timestamps. At the moment you'll have to detect the playback event and just hope that the video is playing back at the "correct" speed, and change the slides based on a JavaScript clock. While that works most of the time, it isn't what I'd describe as reliable…

I am by no means experienced in this area, but a quick search of MDN showed the 'timeupdate' event[1]. Is that not sufficient for the usecase you gave? The timestamp itself is available through the 'currentTime' property[2] so you can always have that value as well.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/timeupda...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl...

Edit: Added links for quick reference.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#109

Post by eldod » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

blinkingled wrote: post #58

Now if they could make Firefox play those videos on Android all would be good. Are NYT videos DRM enabled or use a codec that FF doesn't support on Android? FF should be just using the platform provided codecs and if it works in Chrome it should work in FF - but I just get a Video/Mime Type unsupported error on FF when browsing NYT.

There are no DRMs on the NYT streams (hls.js supports AES encryption, but it's not exactly a DRM liek Widewine or Playready).

Firefox Android doesn't have Media source Extensions, that allow HLS support in HTML5 : http://www.jwplayer.com/html5/mediasource/

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#110

Post by NoGravitas » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

_jomo wrote: post #59

smaili wrote: post #10

Fantastic news and congrats to the NY Times team. Does anyone know, who at this point still continues to use Flash?

Pretty much every music streaming service I know of. There were a few that used HTML5, but all of them shut down (most recently rdio). For Spotify, there's a years old request on the forums [0] their support keeps linking people to, but it doesn't seem like they're doing anything about it. Deezer uses Flash for "security reasons" [1] and they don't plan to use HTML5. Someone mentioned Google Play might work, but I ha…

I was painfully annoyed when Songza shut down and redirected to Google Play Music. Songza worked happily without Flash, but Play Music requires it (so far). Also, Play Music has more intrusive ads than Songza.