

Flash on Android is shockingly bad - maxharris
http://newteevee.com/2010/08/31/video-flash-on-android-is-startlingly-bad/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gigaomnetwork+%28The+GigaOM+Network%29

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Rabidgremlin
I've had no problems watching on-demand video content from my local TV station
on my Nexus One: <http://www.tvnz.co.nz/video>

I would say the devil is in the implementations not the flash player....

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megablast
Are you sure it is not using HTML5? tvnz have all their stuff in html5 as
well, to work on the iPhone and iPad. They are actually very trend setting in
this area.

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seanalltogether
Since the video review requires flash to view it, I decided to fire up my
nexus one to watch it. The video started at 10 fps and jumped to ~25 after 5
seconds of decoding. This seems completely contrary to what the author is
claiming.

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zmmmmm
I've watched quite a lot of videos around the web without any particular
problem. I suspect the ones he is trying are all very high quality streams, or
using an encoding that Android doesn't support well.

I regularly watch iView (<http://www.abc.net.au/iview/>) here in Australia and
Flash playback is flawless on the Nexus One across the board. I'm really glad
I have it even if there are situations where it doesn't work well.

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zenocon
there are a large number of sites that also demo html5 sucking just as bad.
video=FUDcrap. 230+ points for this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646430> really? ...when it sent smoke
rings out my dual core with 4GB of RAM? i most certainly don't work for adobe,
but crap like this is what made me stop reading slashdot. btw: i like arcade
fire a lot.

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marknutter
Well all things being equal, wouldn't it be better for the open-source
solution to win out in the end?

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dantheman
html 5 is not a replacement for flash, not even close.

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ugh
HTML5 doesn’t need to have all capabilities of Flash. The Flash plugin might
very well be relegated to Java plugin status (i.e. hardly ever used) while
still being a lot more capable than HTML5.

All HTML5 has to capture are the most common use cases Flash is currently used
for. Video? Sure deal. Audio? Looks like it will work. Animations? No problem.
Infographics with light interactivity (like the stuff you find on
nytimes.com)? Will work. Games? Hm, not so great. Audio and video capture?
Let’s not talk about that. Oh, and restaurant websites? Shouldn’t have used
Flash in the first place.

What’s important is what’s widely used, not what something is theoretically
capable of. You are right that HTML5 is far from being able to match all the
features of Flash. It doesn’t have to.

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rbranson
... and the platform won't survive long-term on free games and audio/video
capture alone.

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ergo98
Video has been a relatively recent use for Flash, where it pushed out
QuickTime (which Steve stills stews over), MediaPlayer, Real Media Player, and
others. It's always been an odd purpose for it, given that it's an ultra thin
wrapper around a standard stream, so extracting that stream seems to be an
obvious choice. Many "flash videos" are simply a h264 video consumed by an
SWF, so decoupling that seems like a big advantage.

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beej71
Articles that equate Flash with Flash Video are shockingly bad.

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markkanof
This point needs to be emphasized more. All these articles just deal with
video and then come to the conclusion that HTML5 is better than Flash because
the video playback is smoother. What no one seems to mention is the much more
complex applications that are built in Flash.

There is basically no existing tooling to build complex things in HTML5. A
designer I know is working on a massive graphical timeline. It has tons of
different layers and all sorts of user interaction points. It's a pretty big
undertaking with the tooling that Adobe provides for working with Flash. It
would take an order of magnitude more effort to do the same project with HTML5
and there would probably need to be someone involved with significant
programming knowledge.

Someday maybe the tooling will exist but at the moment HTML5 just isn't a
reasonable replacement for everything that Flash can do.

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fourlittlebees
Did I miss the part where they said HTML5 was better? I took it to be more of
a slam of the Android fanboys who insist that Android is better than iOS
because look! we have Flash and you don't! Reality is, video just plain sucks
on mobile, period and until the various lunatics quit pimping which platform
is cooler and actually work on fixing it, it's all going to suck.

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mgcross
Flash on my N1 hasn't quite lived up to my expectations, but my experience has
been better than the reviewer's. I have flash set to 'on demand' to avoid all
of the superfluous flash banner/video content fed from ad CDNs. Use firebug or
resource tracker on abc.go.com or fox.com to get an idea of how many swfs and
javascript files are loaded and queued and you'll understand why performance
will be sub par whether playing video via flash or <video>.

That said, in testing mp4s on my site, the same video (480x360 or 640x360
h.264 baseline) served with <video> seems to play with less stuttering and
better scaling than when using a flash wrapper.

I just wish I could play more orisinal games on the N1. The games run well,
but drag mouse events seem limited to a second or two.

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JangoSteve
It's interesting how differently we sometimes treat "release early, release
often" depending on how big the company is that's doing it. With headlines
like these on the front page, I can see why so many people feel like they need
their product to be absolutely perfect before they release it.

I for one have been enjoying flash on my droid, but I guess my expectations
weren't set nearly high enough.

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tajddin
I don't understand why there's such a polarization regarding Flash vs. HTML5.
A well-designed platform should take advantage of the technology that applies
best for its intended market -- whether it's using a single technology or
multiple technologies working harmoniously together.

As an example, we're working on CRM/Help Desk/CMS platform that uses a
Flex/Air management interface in combination with mobile app versions and an
HTML5-based customer frontend -- a decision we've made due to the complexities
of the project and our intended market.

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gvb
s/shockingly/predictably/

There is a _lot_ more involved in "horsepower" than clock rate. Taking a
power-optimized processor and running a program that is notoriously resource
hungry (i.e. written very inefficiently) will result in a poor "user
experience." Predictably.

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vetinari
Don't put blame on Flash, when trying to decode 720p/1080p video on
Snapdragon. This CPU simply doesn't have the power to do that, no matter what
the clock rate is.

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kyleslattery
For what it's worth, I've had a similar experience on my Motorola Droid.

The worst part about having Flash, though, is all the Flash advertising that I
now see.

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zmmmmm
Why don't you just turn it off and have it run only on request?

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kyleslattery
Ah, didn't know that setting existed, much better now :)

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guelo
I've been surprised how often Flash has come in handy on my Evo. From the
WordPress Audio player, to random FunnyOrDie videos, to NYTimes infographics,
even for watching embedded YouTube without having to leave the context of a
web page.

It's not perfect but it seems to work pretty well 9/10 times. It is very
useful and nice to have, no matter how much the diehard Apple fanboys want to
believe otherwise.

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weaksauce
I would like it on my iPhone and iPad but I can live without it for the most
part. I like the fact that a lot of video sites are doing the html5 video
route and the iPhone and iPad popularity is pushing that adoption. funny or
die works fine on my iPad. There are the ocasional restaurant websites and
some other sites that don't work correctly without flash but they are a small
minority of the sites that I visit.

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darrenkopp
The daily show video works quite well. Can't watch that for free on any apple
product, so I'll stick with flash

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benologist
Yes Adobe should just abandon the technology that pioneered many of the things
in HTML5 because everything's invented now!

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photon_off
I didn't rtfa because it looks like flamewar linkbait, but to me anything
would be better than a blank rectangle.

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naelshawwa
Not shocked : )

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ergo98
Here's a video response.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU>

It doesn't at all dismiss the observations made by newteevee, but I'm just
trying to bring some balance in for people who might be considering a device
and contemplating how much Flash really matters: A lot of these sites are
picking the absolute worst cases and parading them as the standard, when
they're anything but.

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confuzatron
HTC Desire here. I watched the flash video in the newteevee site, and it
played well. But when I wanted to pause it I found I couldn't, as the UI
relies on mouse hover! I have flash disabled on my phone as it kills webpage
performance.

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c00p3r
Shockingly for flash fan-boys or for guys who can understand at least the
basics of a system's engineering? ^_^

