

To keep Flash relevant, Adobe must resort to the nuclear option - techdog
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2010/02/to-keep-flash-relevant-adobe-must.html

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ZeroGravitas
It's interesting that everyone seems to accept "we can't make this open source
because of H.264" from Adobe far more than they accept the opposite "we can't
use H.264 because we're open source" from Mozilla.

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viraptor
I could make a guess. Adobe is a big corporation that can still put a lot of
pressure on others in many different ways. They probably have devs who could
write own implementation of H.264 given enough time. They could release their
solution based on a licence that doesn't prevent linking with closed codec. Or
many other things...

Mozilla is bound by the license. If you find a good enough codec, you can
create a plugin yourself - but it will not be included in the main package,
unless it's open.

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blasdel
> If you find a good enough codec, you can create a plugin yourself

No, you can't. Gecko links directly with liboggplay to support <video> and
<audio>. To hack it to do something sane you'd have to fork both Gecko and
XULrunner, and distribute your own builds of Firefox with unofficial branding.

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viraptor
There are many ways to hijack the content. Are you sure you cannot make an
extension that rewrites the page before the <video> tag is interpreted by the
browser and injects some custom object instead (handled by the h264 plugin)?

Actually, I just realised that noscript does a similar thing (proxy object
instead of flash content) - so it has to be possible.

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ZeroGravitas
If you're just wanting to display video then I'm fairly certain that Firefox
will hand off any video you give it to an application that registers to handle
it via the object tag.

For example, I'm fairly certain that this how it reacts to stuff that Apple
serves directly to quicktime (trailers and product promos), when you're on
Linux.

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blasdel
Firefox doesn't do that, your NSAPI plugins do: on Linux there are plugins
that wrap mplayer, vlc, or totem supporting the quicktime API in widespread
use. Unfortunately all of them suck terribly -- seeking is always broken, they
always find a way to do the wrong thing wrt progressive download, weirdass
YUV->RGB artifacts after dropped keyframes, etc.

You could write a new NSAPI plugin using ffmpeg that provides the <video> API
but proxied through <object>, and package it in an XPI along with some
greasemonkey-style extension code to rewrite the tags and provide the default
playback UI.

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nfnaaron
The first comment after the article, by Sh0rtWave has some good pro-Flash
observations.

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grogers
While video may be a small aspect of what flash provides, it is likely the
overwhelming majority of what flash is actually used for.

He's right that even if flash video was obsoleted, it wouldn't die completely
because it does have other legitimate uses.

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messel
I wonder why Flash didn't open up it's format and offer it up as an
alternative?

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riffic
because it's crap and everyone knows it. can we stop upvoting threads about
flash now?

