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Flash-Free Video in 2016

open.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#131

Post by samstave »

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…

Would you say thatvthey were terribly poor stewards due to it being a product of macromedia which adobe bought and then a ton of the core group at macromedia cashed out and left after the purchase leaving tech debt vacuum at adobe wrt flash...?

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#132

Post by acdha »

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 look forward to the day when we can say HTML5 is so much better (than Flash) for interactive/media content on the web

That depends on the kind of media we're talking about about: HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance, which is a big deal for laptop users. Even if you're plugged in, having the fans running constantly and still seeing dropped frames is a terrible experience.

I suspect the story is still different for WebGL but the only benchmarks I've seen are fairly old by now.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#133

Post by chrisseaton »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #15
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?

The BBC still do which I find infuriating...

I think it you tell your browser to claim its an iPad there is magically much more HTML 5 video content on the BBC.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#134

Post by JohnTHaller »

modeless wrote: post #112
akoumjian wrote: post #97

It should be noted that the native browser decoders for h264 still produce worse color presentation than flash players. Also, the flash runtime's pseudo-streaming is faster than Chrome's http pseudo-streaming (it takes longer for the same h264 file to start playing back). I love HTML5 video, but there are still huge areas for improvement that show up frequently.

YouTube in Chrome starts playing video practically instantly, before the page is even finished loading. It's faster than Flash ever was.

parent is referring to pseudo-streaming (aka downloading a video over http), not proper streaming (aka YouTube, etc)

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#135

Post by dplgk »

phkahler wrote: post #83
dplgk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much easier to author and publish an animated ad using Flash than HTML/JS.

>> It's much easier to author and publish an animated ad using Flash than HTML/JS. I thought you just put a video tag and point it at the URL of a video file. What else is missing? ;-)

100% Browser support. And if you consider the only people that click ads are probably running IE 4, then browser support is pretty important.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#136

Post by aikah »

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.

> 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.

Big AS3 fan here, it is less true today. I accept the fact that, while AS3 and Flash IDEs were exciting technologies to work with ( I worked with cool artists, musicians, video producers on crazy futuristic projects...), The underlying tech was bad, for 2 reasons

- security. this one is obvious.

- closed source tech. Flash is now almost dead since Adobe basically pulled the plug on the IDE and there is nothing AS3 devs can do about it. Yes the compiler is open source, but the player is not.

I made me appreciate the how important open technologies are. They do not solve everything. But they are important.

Frankly, as someone said somewhere else in the thread, Adobe killed Flash, by not opening the plugin's source code, by not trying to make it unnecessary. A lot can be done now with WebGL, C++ compilation can be done with Emscripten , Web APIs now cover a lot of what Flash used to do, and where was Adobe on that ? Edge Animate ? what a joke.

With the fall of Flash there are opportunities though, so that's a good thing. I'm thinking hard about it.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#137

Post by ferrari8608 »

paol wrote: post #73
coldpie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has the setting "media.autoplay.enabled" for this. It mostly works, although some websites (notably Youtube) assume that autoplay succeeded and so the player acts slightly wonky, e.g. the played/paused state is backwards. I would be interested to know of any extensions that do similar and work better.

I have autoplay disabled in FF. The trick in Youtube is to double click the play button the first time. After that all works normally. (For some reason double clicking the video area doesn't produce the same result.)

Double clicking the video area is a shortcut for fullscreen view.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#138

Post by BatFastard »

StillBored wrote: post #129
neals wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 los…

Totally agree. Rather than getting more enjoyable to work with, things just keep getting more and more fragmented. In some ways that's great, but for developers it means a hodgepodge of frameworks and tools. And things keep fragmenting more and more, new languages, more devices, more types of experience. I was a C++ game developer for many years, and last couple of years I have been using Flash for development. Other than memory management it's a great language. Been developing mobile applications on it as well as 60 fps 3D apps. Come on Adobe, we need you to promote Flash!

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#139

Post by flavioribeiro »

jmstickney wrote: post #5

If they still serve video via Brightcove, seems like a big win for the Zencoder acquisition, which included the video.js player. I do see video.js in the source.

there's no Brightcove neither videojs, VHS was built from scratch and we have plans to open source it.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#140

Post by RHSeeger »

sparky_z wrote: post #71
0_00_0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? There are extensions for blocking autoplay HTML5 media same as flash...

They don't work reliably (some things still autoplay), and sometimes they break the media entirely or don't discriminate between things you actually want to autoplay. For example, the one I currently have installed also blocks "gifv" files from autoplaying in the browser, even though there's no play button to click on. Every time I click on a reddit link that turns out to be a gifv file on imgur, it stays frozen on t…

When you right click on the gifv, there should be an option to "Show Controls", which allows you to start/pause/etc it.
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