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Flash-Free Video in 2016

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Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#181

Post by fenomas »

acdha wrote: post #179
fenomas wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Hardware acceleration is a broad term used to describe different things and implementation quality still matters (i.e. does it do everything from format decoding to color conversion, scaling, compositing, etc. and are any individual steps combined?). Every time I've done that comparison, Flash has used significantly more CPU for the same file. It's possible that they've finally managed to get close on the right combi…

To clarify I was mainly talking about the days when HTML video was newish and flash was still a big priority to Adobe, and there was uncertainty which would win. I agree with what you're saying over the long run and certainly today.

But I'd have to quibble with saying flash was never better than native playback - presumably so for raw performance, but that wasn't the goal. Flash video was never great for being technically superior, it was great for cutting the Gordian knot that was the codec problem (and indeed one presumes technical tradeoffs had to be made to that end).

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#182

Post by clouddrover »

j2bax wrote: post #177
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.

I'm not saying it's not possible. I've seen some incredible HTML5 and WebGL games/tests with limited modern browser support. Unfortunately our clients (large children's entertainment companies) require their games can be played on every device in every browser. Sadly, it costs us more to do less in so many environments.

But that's not really a Flash versus HTML5 issue, that's a device support issue. Adobe failed to get their Flash platform on all the devices you want to support so you're using an alternative platform, which is fair enough. If you limited the comparison to the places Flash runs you could be making the same games with HTML5, couldn't you?

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#183

Post by nemothekid »

ethbro wrote: post #180
jdc wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think Adobe should have done to hinder people from creating (or perhaps publishing) low quality content?

Require developer accounts with authorization tokens to consume more than a set amount of CPU before the framework terminated your animation? Call it "Flash Pro" or something. Then at least you've got an account on Joe frameloop ad.

So I would need a developer token to put up a flash animation on my website? I'm sure that would have killed adoption, and my hunch says that the ad agencies that were churning out the 100% CPU ads who dropped $799 on Flash could pay for the developer account anyways.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#184

Post by Newbcake »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #176
clouddrover wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've not seen a single WebGL game on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit ever. I used to see and play Flash games all the time. It's not even remotely what it used to be.

TagPro is a pretty popular browser game on reddit, doesn't use flash as far I know.

http://tagpro.gg

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#185

Post by acdha »

fenomas wrote: post #181
acdha wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware acceleration is a broad term used to describe different things and implementation quality still matters (i.e. does it do everything from format decoding to color conversion, scaling, compositing, etc. and are any individual steps combined?). Every time I've done that comparison, Flash has used significantly more CPU for the same file. It's possible that they've finally managed to get close on the right combi…

To clarify I was mainly talking about the days when HTML video was newish and flash was still a big priority to Adobe, and there was uncertainty which would win. I agree with what you're saying over the long run and certainly today. But I'd have to quibble with saying flash was never better than native playback - presumably so for raw performance, but that wasn't the goal. Flash video was never great for being techni…

The codec problem was real but portability didn't make the performance (or reliability & security) problems inevitable. That was due to Adobe's management seeing the period of browser stagnation & the lack of widely available high-quality codecs as the natural order of things rather than an unlikely opportunity which they'd lucked into.

It's interesting to speculate about what might have happened had they chosen to cultivate a culture of software quality rather than putting everything on customer-milking mode. If Flash had performed well and been well-supported with a non-joke update strategy, Steve Jobs wouldn't have had so many enthusiastic supporters in the war on Flash and the second round of browser wars might never have heated up.

I count myself in that camp in part because I've always preferred the web's openness but also because I used Flash for a few projects and saw how horrible the experience was – technical debt at record levels, clumsy development tools and lousy documentation, and the $800 price didn't even buy reading comprehension on support requests. Fortunately, WebKit was getting serious traction by then so it became increasingly easy to avoid it. If I had any doubts about that call, it was confirmed when the next Flash release came out a year or so later and all of my bug reports were closed with a generic “please pay $900 to see if this was fixed” message after I'd gone to the trouble of including reproducible test cases for each one.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#186

Post by cpeterso »

Pxtl wrote: post #143
cpeterso wrote: post #113

One advantage of Flash over HTML5 video (in Firefox, at least) is that Flash has its own H.264 decoder for platforms that don't include one (like Windows XP or the "N/KN editions" of Windows for Europe and Korea). Flash can also use the GPU for decoding or compositing of video on XP, providing better performance than Firefox playing VP9 using a software decoder. YouTube recently relegated Flash to the bottom of its l…

XP machines? In 2016? That's solving the wrong problem.

XP is still a big problem. About 14% of Firefox users are running XP, about the same share as running Windows 10. Google says they will drop support for Chrome on XP and Vista in April 2016. They already extended their XP EOL twice before (from December 2015 and April 2015), so there's a good chance they will need to do it again.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#187

Post by cpeterso »

akoumjian wrote: post #170
imaginenore wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 offic…

Here is an example of a Firefox bug report about H.264 color spaces looking different in Firefox compared to another video player. So these are real problems. :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1237562

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#188

Post by j2bax »

clouddrover wrote: post #182
j2bax wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's not possible. I've seen some incredible HTML5 and WebGL games/tests with limited modern browser support. Unfortunately our clients (large children's entertainment companies) require their games can be played on every device in every browser. Sadly, it costs us more to do less in so many environments.

But that's not really a Flash versus HTML5 issue, that's a device support issue. Adobe failed to get their Flash platform on all the devices you want to support so you're using an alternative platform, which is fair enough. If you limited the comparison to the places Flash runs you could be making the same games with HTML5, couldn't you?

You are right, it is probably more of an issue with supporting mobile browsers and desktop browsers with the same game, but web game budgets not having really moved any since the Flash days to support two very different form factors. A project budget went quite a bit further towards making an awesome game, when we only had to support desktop browsers which for the most part, all had good Flash support.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#189

Post by cpeterso »

flavioribeiro wrote: post #139
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.

btw, what does "VHS" stand for? It's an awesome name. :)

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#190

Post by cpeterso »

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/

Firefox on Android is supposed support MSE (for MP4/H.264, but not WebM/VP9). For example, YouTube MSE works in Firefox. Is it broken for you? That JW Player page is out of date. It also says MSE doesn't work on Firefox desktop. :)
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