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Flash-Free Video in 2016

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Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#161

Post by ilaksh »

Pxtl wrote: post #142
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…

Not only that, but the GPU exposure to HTML5 creates a massive stability and security risk. Flash failed not just because it was a browser plug-in, but also because it was terrible - Adobe no longer knew how to tame the beast they'd created and the result was terrible performance and bad user-experience. I'm sad a more sane platform for game/video content didn't win. The browser doesn't need to do everything . HTML5…

WebGL is not a massive security or stability risk. That security stuff was mostly paid FUD from fraudulent demos that faked data leaks. The stability issues have mainly been avoided by not including WebGL content on non-graphics pages.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#162

Post by eldod »

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.

When did you try doing it? Things evolved a lot in the last 3 years in terms of video streaming support in HTML5, and today everything that was doable in Flash is doable in HTML5 with MSN and EME. You have control over the playback almost up to the keyframe today. Do you have any specific features in mind?

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#163

Post by imaginenore »

akoumjian wrote: post #153
serge2k wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> native browser decoders for h264 still produce worse color presentation than flash players which browsers? Which platforms?

Last I checked Chrome's h264 had less accurate color presentation than most off the shelf flash decoders. I can't seem to recall how Firefox's webm decoding stood up when the file was comparatively accurate to the h264 the flash player was using.

Show us the evidence of that claim.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#164

Post by clouddrover »

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…

> we still aren't able to provide the quality of games that we were in Flash 3-4 years ago

What's an example of this? The HTML5 and WebGL games I've seen match anything I've seen in Flash. It's true that you need an up to date and capable browser, but that's true of any platform.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#165

Post by forrestthewoods »

clouddrover wrote: post #164
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…

> we still aren't able to provide the quality of games that we were in Flash 3-4 years ago What's an example of this? The HTML5 and WebGL games I've seen match anything I've seen in Flash. It's true that you need an up to date and capable browser, but that's true of any platform.

10 years ago there were a dozen sites dedicated to flash games that raked in millions of views per month. I couldn't name you a single WebGL site dedicated to games.

Where is the modern day Newgrounds? There isn't one. It doesn't exist. And that's a damn shame.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#166

Post by fenomas »

acdha wrote: post #132
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 i…

> HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance..

Flash video was never perceptibly slower than html per se. The only thing that really affects video performance is whether or not it's hardware accelerated, and in cases where flash used HW it performed the same as html. The reason it seemed slower is that AFAIK there's never been an HTML video implementation that falls back to software, whereas flash would do so if HW wasn't supported.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#167

Post by Arnavion »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #123
Etzos wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Yep, here's an example - if you mouse down on the video thumb, and don't move the mouse nor release the mouse button (so basically you've held the thumb in place):

- Does the pause event fire?

- Does the seeking event fire? Or does it only fire when you move the mouse to drag the thumb to a new time?

- Does the seekend event fire? Does it fire every time you move the thumb to a new position without releasing the mouse button? Or does it only fire when you release the mouse button?

- Does the timeupdate event fire? Does it fire once? Or repeatedly for the same position where the thumb is?

Every browser has different answers.

As for the timeupdate event, it only fires once every 250ms, which is painfully slow for applications that need to synchronize something with the video (slides, subtitles, etc.)

And even if you decided to ignore all the events and write a requestAnimationFrame-powered loop to query only the changes in the currentTime property, there's a bug in Chrome on Android where the video.currentTime property becomes out-of-sync with the video if any long-running JS or complicated animation blocks the event loop for a few seconds - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=509010

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#168

Post by Arnavion »

sparky_z wrote: post #146
RHSeeger wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Holy crap, that's really helpful. Thank you! But from the user perspective... how was I ever supposed to guess that?

FYI the exact wording depends on the browser, but all HTML5 video elements will have that context menu option. And other options like "Copy URL", "Loop", etc. depending on the browser.

Of course some websites like youtube override the context menu event to prevent that from showing.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#169

Post by clouddrover »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #165
clouddrover wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we still aren't able to provide the quality of games that we were in Flash 3-4 years ago What's an example of this? The HTML5 and WebGL games I've seen match anything I've seen in Flash. It's true that you need an up to date and capable browser, but that's true of any platform.

10 years ago there were a dozen sites dedicated to flash games that raked in millions of views per month. I couldn't name you a single WebGL site dedicated to games. Where is the modern day Newgrounds? There isn't one. It doesn't exist. And that's a damn shame.

I'd say Newgrounds is the modern day Newgrounds. I don't have Flash installed, I went to Newgrounds, and the first couple of games I clicked on worked without Flash while others still required it. If there's new or old content that still requires Flash, then it can be emulated. Here's an example of a large collection of games playable in an HTML5-based emulator: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

As for other HTML5\WebGL focused sites, here's an example of a site making HTML5 games: https://ga.me/

And here are a couple of sites indexing WebGL games:

http://www.webglgames.com/

http://www.webgl.nu/

So don't worry. There's lots of HTML5 game development going on.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#170

Post by akoumjian »

imaginenore wrote: post #163
akoumjian wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked Chrome's h264 had less accurate color presentation than most off the shelf flash decoders. I can't seem to recall how Firefox's webm decoding stood up when the file was comparatively accurate to the h264 the flash player was using.

Show us the evidence of that claim.

No reason to be hostile. We investigated months back when we got reports from our users, who are professional videographers, that videos were showing up much worse in some browser situations than others. They sent us screen shots, and upon investigating found that on almost every clip we were getting better results using two different flash players we had access to than the native decoder.

I don't have some big official report because, well, that's not my job and I have better things to do. You're welcome to investigate yourself if you're concerned about it.

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