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Flash-Free Video in 2016

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Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#121

Post by Chris_Newton »

cballard wrote: post #64
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.

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

There are many cases where it’s much more user-friendly to have proper control over audio/video players and proper event handling: custom controls to change resolution/quality settings, synchronization of the audio or video with accompanying material, integration of video with other content, having interactions elsewhere on a page adjust audio or video to match, remembering which tutorials a user has finished so you can start with the next one ready to go next time, and that’s just what I came up with in a few seconds.

Sure, if you just want to play your free videos from a site where each page is basically just a wrapper around the video element, and you don’t need any configuration for quality settings and the like, then custom control and events might not be particularly interesting. However, HTML5 media elements should let us do much more than that.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#122

Post by [deleted] »

eldod wrote: post #109
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/

[deleted]

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#123

Post by Chris_Newton »

Etzos wrote: post #108
Someone1234 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In theory, yes, that’s how you’re supposed to do it. Unfortunately, part of the real world problem with switching to HTML5 media elements is that browsers have an awful track record in terms of quality of implementation. At various points, even quite basic events simply haven’t been firing properly in one browser or another. And with browsers updating every six weeks and frequently changing things like the default controls you get on a video element, you’re constantly aiming at unnecessarily moving targets as a developer.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#124

Post by douche »

whitegrape wrote: post #87
jessedhillon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly. I personally would like advertisers and content producers to know at which point it is that users tend to bail on watching their video, or will click through to the content. That might allow business users to receive useful feedback and actually optimize their funnel, instead of wasting my time with a shotgun, best guess approach.

It would be interesting to see Youtube's statistics on this, because for almost every case personally on my mobile devices and every case I've seen others deal with, that bail-out point is "as soon as possible" if the ad can be skipped.

It wouldn't be so bad, if they would show you more than one or two different ads. I remember Hulu being especially egregious about that. I'd watch a couple hours of the back catalog of some show, and see maybe 20-30 ads in their "commercial breaks", except it was always the same ad.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#125

Post by gmfawcett »

Live streaming is still a pain-point in HTML5. I can play a live HLS stream on my Android or iOS phone, or I can play a live RTMP stream through Flash on the desktop; but everything else on the desktop is flaky, or experimental and flaky (MPEG-DASH), or just nonexistent (in the browser, that is -- not including video clients like VLC). I would love to see 2016 be the year where this gap is closed!

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#126

Post by Chris_Newton »

tbrock wrote: post #4

Sometimes I think Steve Jobs' greatest contribution may have been killing flash. Today is a glorious day.

There is a certain irony that after all the arguments about how plugins are bad and we must kill Flash, actually video on iOS devices typically still plays via a plugin today, just a different one. Moreover, because of Apple’s policy about browsers all having to use the same engine on those devices, no-one can provide an alternative browser that does better.

This situation breaks everything from basic cookie mechanics to possibilities for caching short videos for offline use, which should have been letting us do all kinds of interesting and useful things now that the videos are supposed to be part of the normal content on a page.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#127

Post by dplgk »

heynk wrote: post #32
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.

Can you elaborate on this? At work we have a HTML video player that works with files, YouTube, and Vimeo all with the same skin, and we're easily able to do things like save state across sessions. I will say that the transcoding aspect can be complicated. What limitations have you hit?

Listening for video events (cross-browser) reliably. When is a video loading, buffering, paused, what time is it? etc

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#128

Post by [deleted] »

coldpie wrote: post #77
sparky_z wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me I've looked. As far as I can tell, there's no way to make one that works for everything because the HTML5 standard* doesn't have a clear distinction between things that autoplay and things that don't, the way there was between "flash content" and "everything else". *I'm not a tech guy so I may be using the wrong terminology here.

Yes, it's a tricky problem because "what does autoplay mean?" If you load up a page containing an HTML5 game, presumably you want the background music and SFX to work. But how do we differentiate those from an unwanted autoplaying audio ad? I believe the Firefox devs settled on anything during/after a user interaction is allowed to autoplay. More at this bug (which I've been following for years, if you couldn't tell…

[deleted]

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#129

Post by StillBored »

neals wrote: post #118
j2bax wrote: post #115

I was at a primarily Flash based company during the glory days of Flash and then through the transition to HTML5/JS. While I understand perfectly (and even support) why the shift happened (thanks Steve!), its still frustrating sometimes to know that now, years later we still aren't able to provide the quality of games that we were in Flash 3-4 years ago. We can do a lot, and things have come a ways, but right before…

I totally agree. I've worked with AS3 up until a few months ago but have also been moving to HTML5 for a few years besides. The amount of brainpower that is wasted on quirky legacy browser behaviour and the lack of consistency between them makes me long for the days where I could position and measure and control with ease and speed as in Flash.

I might say much the same things about web development in general. Twenty, years later I still think its easier to create a desktop application with a remote SQL back-end than a web app for any moderately complex application. Data aware visual components and the like have only pale imitations in html/javascript/css. Things like crystal reports have been ported to the web environment but along the way seem to have lost the convenience they had, where it was possible to add them 3/4 of the way through a project. Now you have to rework 1/2 the back-end code (it not the entire project) to add a package like into the mix.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#130

Post by dplgk »

danappelxx wrote: post #72
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.

Can you elaborate on the issues with iTunes, Wifi, and Xcode? I know the app store is just a wrapper (which makes it pretty bad) but Xcode is a wonderful (but buggy) IDE, I don't understand how you can make WiFi bad, and I really have no idea where they went wrong with iTunes.

iTunes is a slow, bloated mess with UI that gets worse with every release. Classic dumbness: Adding 1 song or photo to a phone requires erasing the entire phone because it's synced from another computer? Or trying to sync a folder of photos from computer -> brand new iPhone with brand new iTunes doesn't work. Just stalled progress bar forever.

WiFi: There are constantly WiFI problems with OSX and iOS. From plain-ol' reliability to straight up bugs. This isn't including boring DNS stupidity from OSX.

https://www.google.com/search?q=osx+wifi+bug

Xcode: Absurdly slugish and crashing constantly.

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