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Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

blog.laptopmag.com

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Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#171

Post by chopsueyar »

contextfree wrote: post #12

Do the videos need to be optimized for mobile because of API incompatibilities, or just to make up for dearer machine resources (CPU, RAM, network etc.) available on mobile? If the latter, wouldn't it presumably be just as possible to make HTML apps that don't work on mobile for the same reasons? Ditto for the game control issue - if someone makes an game that's designed for keyboard control (or a site dependent on "…

No, yes (dearer resources).

For a VOD, streaming video, you don't just slap up one video file and be done with it.

You must have multiple versions of the same file, but encoded for the playback device's characteristics (fps, screensize, bandwidth).

It is not uncommon to have at least 3 encoded versions of a particular movie/video. (low, med., high quality)

Flash can perform a bandwidth test prior to playing a video, to determine which file to load. However, if there is only one file, it cannot transcode on the fly to a lower bitrate/resolution.

The author of the article stated it worked fine on certain sites, but others were choppy. So, it is not on the client side, it is on the server side.

In the US, we can assume the majority of streaming video network connectivity would fall under broadband (dsl, cable, fios), cellular (gprs, 3g), and wifi (802.11b,g,n).

Depending on how the device is connected, the encoded bitrate can make a huge difference.

*Caveat: This is using h.264 (not VP6), with a Baseline profile of 3.

If you encode at the baseline level 3, you can reuse your h.264 file to play on ipods/iphones at 640x480, but with iPad, you can push it to 720p, baseline 3.1

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#172

Post by chopsueyar »

bigiain wrote: post #85
cookiecaper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML5 is cool but it's not the end-all. You have a whole set of new issues to deal with when you use HTML5. You have to worry about cross-browser compatibility and specific rendering bugs, whereas Flash authors don't. You have to rely on the slow JavaScript VMs included in even the fastest browsers (even the "fast" JS VMs are still rather slow), and then you have IE, which is still used by > 50% of internet users, of…

"If you want your thing to work for most people, you are going to have to write in Flash anyway." Some of the big sites I'm involved with are on track to hit 10% mobile use before the end of the year. And most of that is iOS. The assumption that "most people" are windows desktop users is becoming less and less valid.

What percentage are windows desktop users?

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#173

Post by elblanco »

mishmash wrote: post #134
elblanco wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here ya go. Give this a try and let us know how it runs. http://xplsv.com/prods/demos/xplsv_orsotheysay/

I ran two three minute tests, one in Safari and the other Firefox on a 2.8GHz C2D w/ 4GB RAM and nothing else really open. In Safari 5.0.1 your link didn't render a single frame in three minutes. Firefox 4b3 did render, but the animation would not normally be watchable. The opening scene ran the best, probably around 15fps while during second and third scenes the galaxies would jump about an inch with each frame. I d…

Well, the demo is an amazing demonstration of HTML 5, and the limitations of HTML 5...if your browser can swing it. It runs pretty great in Chrome, not so great in FF and sucks everywhere else.

What if this were a Flash demo? Only be mildy interesting -- and that's only for the presentation itself. From a technology perspective it'd be ho-hum.

I think more important than that is that it's not even interactive. Interactivity with HTML 5 apps has light years to go compared with Flash even if browser vendors can lick the performance problem.

In other words, HTML 5 as a content delivery platform has a very long way to go...and as it is is certainly not anywhere near as a cross platform as Flash is. It's just not a swap out substitution for Flash yet and forces developers to produce software that's just simply not of the same quality as Flash is able to handle.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#174

Post by elblanco »

loewenskind wrote: post #155
leviathant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audio capabilities of HTML5 suck. They're not going to get better for a while, and in the time it takes them to catch up, Flash will have continued to build on their well established foundations. Okay, looking at HTML5 drum machines via Google. Here. Here's an one, http://www.randomthink.net/labs/html5drums/ - it's got all the basic trimmings, but the playback has tempo fluctuations, and the whole thing is slow.…

What on earth are you talking about? You're comparing HTML5 today to Flash with their maturity? I would bloody well hope Flash is still faster. The reason HTML5 is the future is it doesn't have the Adobe bottleneck. Is sound bad right now? Then browser makers can fix it. Is Flash a CPU hog? Wait until Adobe cares enough and has enough resources to fix it. Get it?

But HTML 5 is being touted as a drop-in Flash replacement today. And it's clearly not.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#175

Post by loewenskind »

nanairo wrote: post #167
loewenskind wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my biggest gripe about HTML5. They had the chance to really fix a lot of missteps but they made the (IMO) horrible mistake of using JavaScript as their "assembly language". Regardless of what anyone thinks about JavaScript, not everyone is going to want to program with it. Many of us will be programming in something else and compile to the base browser language. What should have happened is that they just def…

Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken them to come to a standard? I think HTML5 is already a bit on the side of being a step too wide, but I guess we've been stuck in HTML4 (and related technologies) for so long that it was necessary. XHTML 2 was an awesome language, imho... just another case of too much meat on the fire, and so never reaching a conclusion. Let's get a good HTML5…

>Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken them to come to a standard?

I don't think it would have to take too long. One browser could do it and then the others could copy it. Further, the standard could be general until it's worked out more.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#176

Post by jcl »

asolove wrote: post #92
jcl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that the only thing preventing Flash from working on mobile is that it hasn't been "optimized" enough -- that opening the source to Google and Apple will unlock performance otherwise unattainable by Adobe. But suppose Adobe's programmers are not completely incompetent? Perhaps Flash's execution model is genuinely unable to be optimized further. Or perhaps most Flash content in the wild runs at the li…

We're talking about Google, a company who wrote their own cleanroom Java implementation and reverse-engineered ActiveX to create a ChromeFrame implementation still compatible with anything that ever worked in IE. I think they could speed things up a bit. ActionScript is just JS plus some extra sugar. JS implementations have gotten hundreds of times faster in the last three years, while Flash has gotten slower. Slap a…

ActionScript is not JS plus sugar. ActionScript 3.0 adds statically-typed variables and class-based inheritance. A good compiler can use these additional constraints to produce better code -- performing more like Java than JavaScript. It's possible that the VM is not the bottleneck here.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#177

Post by daleharvey »

nanairo wrote: post #161
daleharvey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heh not the first time I have made that mistake, when I say "they" I mean macromedia / whoever happened to be in charge of flash at the time of whatever incidence we are talking about.

But I am not sure Flash was really comparable to what it is today back in the days of Macromedia. Did we have Youtube and company back then? My gut feeling is that Adobe there went from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to "hey, wait a minute: we could actually BUY it, and CONTROL it". Adobe bought Macromedia and suddenly Flash was great and amazing and they integrated it with the rest of the their portfolio. The…

I only ever seen the flash progression in those times from peeking over the wall at the other side so people might be able to correct me, but I dont think the adobe acquisition did flash a whole lot of favours, it managed to get its 98% etc penetration well before adobe was ever around.

Back in those days flash vs html for plain websites was a serious debate, under adobe while video has got massively popular, flash has been further and further marginalised as a tool almost only for games, adverts and video.

I certainly couldnt see macromedia open sourcing flash any more than I could see adobe doing it without this pressure, if anything I think macromedia were even more aggressive with shutting down alternative players, at that time they were competing with html which broke in every browser, they wanted to make certain it was write once run everywhere.

To be honest I am entirely biased, but its always seemed obvious to me that open web standards will very very slowly replace virtually everything proprietary on the web. right now there is not one decent web publishing tool and I am pretty stunned that adobe havent stepped up to produce one yet (dreamweaver does not count, and neither does flash exporting canvas). Heres hoping whoever does makes sure it works on linux :)

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#179

Post by loewenskind »

elblanco wrote: post #174
loewenskind wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth are you talking about? You're comparing HTML5 today to Flash with their maturity? I would bloody well hope Flash is still faster. The reason HTML5 is the future is it doesn't have the Adobe bottleneck. Is sound bad right now? Then browser makers can fix it. Is Flash a CPU hog? Wait until Adobe cares enough and has enough resources to fix it. Get it?

But HTML 5 is being touted as a drop-in Flash replacement today . And it's clearly not.

I don't think anyone is saying that. I think people are saying it's a better idea to invest in HTML5 today. And with that I would absolutely agree. Flash has jumped the shark.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#180

Post by glhaynes »

asolove wrote: post #92
jcl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that the only thing preventing Flash from working on mobile is that it hasn't been "optimized" enough -- that opening the source to Google and Apple will unlock performance otherwise unattainable by Adobe. But suppose Adobe's programmers are not completely incompetent? Perhaps Flash's execution model is genuinely unable to be optimized further. Or perhaps most Flash content in the wild runs at the li…

We're talking about Google, a company who wrote their own cleanroom Java implementation and reverse-engineered ActiveX to create a ChromeFrame implementation still compatible with anything that ever worked in IE. I think they could speed things up a bit. ActionScript is just JS plus some extra sugar. JS implementations have gotten hundreds of times faster in the last three years, while Flash has gotten slower. Slap a…

I don't think Flash's problem is speed. It could be sped up by 10x and I don't think it would significantly matter to its market position or future prospects.
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