Flash-Free Video in 2016 • Hacker News Board

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#91

Post by Practicality » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:20 PM UTC

waterlesscloud wrote: post #89

rplnt wrote: post #48

Let's see when Facebook converts. For some reason they love to serve Flash based SOLELY on user agent. So you have a chrome fork without flash? Here, watch this flash. Oh, and this gif is now flash as well. I can't quite figure out why.. but I would vote for incompetence. Can't see any business motivation for doing that.

Yes, Facebook, full of incompetent engineers. I'll never understand why HN is so desperate to believe something that clearly isn't true.

Because the alternative is some kind of conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#92

Post by pjbrunet » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:21 PM UTC

Turn off Flash for YouTube https://www.youtube.com/html5

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#93

Post by bduerst » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:22 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #6

grabcocque wrote: post #2

So, basically Flash lives on because advertisers are still looking for a way to track us without our permission. Gee thanks.

They don't need Flash to track us. Google does it just fine without it.

The difference is whether or not you can detect it effectively.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#94

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:23 PM UTC

martin-adams wrote: post #12

tbrock wrote: post #4

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

But he did give us iTunes on Windows, so in my opinion, that about balances things out.

[deleted]

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#95

Post by kozukumi » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:27 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #24

kozukumi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Frustrates the HELL out of me even more because all their videos are available in web-friendly MP4 for the mobile services and you can get to them if you spoof the user agent. I wish they would just let me toggle a "beta" feature or something.

I'm 99% sure they introduced a non-flash service in beta recently. Edit: Yeah, you can opt-in with a button on the right column here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/html5

Yes I was aware of the iPlayer HTML5 opt-in which is what I was hoping to see for the rest of the site. Given that they have all the content in HTML5-friendly video anyway it shouldn't be all that painful.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#96

Post by shmerl » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:28 PM UTC

I hope DASH will remain patent free. There was some attempt to attack it. It's quite important for Web video.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#97

Post by akoumjian » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

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.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#98

Post by dave2000 » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

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.

Is there any technical or legal reason why it's not as easy to handle playing video as it is to show an image, from a site developer point of view? Why can't the browser do it natively? Why does it have to be handled via JavaScript and whatever else?

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#99

Post by paol » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #80

paol wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It doesn't quite work "normally," the play/pause button state is backwards, but yeah, it works good enough.

Ha, it may very well be, I never noticed.

I find a general difficulty with processing the meaning of "modal" buttons. If it's showing the "Pause" symbol, does it mean it's paused now, or that it will pause when I click it? I had the same problem with the stupid slider buttons that have become fashionable to use in place of checkboxes.

Re: Flash-Free Video in 2016

#100

Post by idle_zealot » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #88

cballard wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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…

Or you can have a javascript loop check the video's current time.