

Adobe: HTML5 Will Throw the Web 'Back to the Dark Ages of Video' - profquail
http://seekingalpha.com/article/186064-adobe-html5-will-throw-the-web-back-to-the-dark-ages-of-video

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Locke1689
I'm not so sure about things like vector graphics animations, but I'd be
willing to bet that Flash has lost online video with HTML5. About time too.
Flash is a plague of the modern browser and I will be happy when I'm rid of it
(Click2Flash already does most of that). Google/Youtube HTML5 HD H.264 is
amazing. What used to take up 95% of a core in Flash now takes 2%. Here's what
I have to say about Flash: good riddance.

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hyperbolist
<http://jilion.com/sublime/video> \-- a Video player for these approaching
Dark Ages

~~~
tolmasky
I go to that site with Firefox and it tells me my browser is not supported.
Firefox.

This is precisely his point, web video used to be like this. "Firefox support
is in the works". People are past the point where they need to have something
"in the works" to do something as simple as showing their audience a video.

I am the biggest open web advocate you will find, but I don't see why its
necessary to lie about the current state of affairs. HTML5 video is _not_
ready for prime time. Will it be at some point? Of course. But pretending it
is today is silly and distracts from fixing its obvious failings. The need to
encode your video into multiple formats is a _big deal_ , the fact IE doesn't
support it at all is a _big deal_ , the question of how to insert dynamic ads
reliably into videos for people like Hulu is a _big deal_. Not to mention its
still pretty darn buggy. The idea that Flash became useless yesterday is a
joke.

~~~
sumeetjain
I don't think anyone is claiming that "Flash became useless yesterday".

hyperbolist was just offering an example of good-looking video via HTML5 to
counter the claim that a world without Flash is a world in the dark ages of
video.

~~~
tolmasky
My point is that unless you are deliberately trying to put words in his mouth
(or simply didn't read the article), that link _proves_ the CTO's point, not
counters it. Look at the exact quote from our CTO friend:

"...so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of
video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

He's not saying the player won't look good or be sexy or whatever, he saying
it will throw us back into the times when watching video depended on what
OS/browser/codecs you had. This link demonstrates that exactly.

Instead of laughing at him and brushing of what he is saying by pointing to
some demo that doesn't work in most people's browsers, we should take it as
valid criticisms and demand the standards bodies get it together and fix these
problems.

~~~
hyperbolist
Many sites deliver video by H.264 in the absence of Flash. It is seamless to
the user, and there are no blue legos. The fact that Flash is missing from
iPhones and iPod Touches, and that people with those devices are using the
web, produced this situation. The "Dark Age" is already here, and it's not a
dark age.

The link I submitted is indeed both an example of the "Dark Age problem" of
HTML5 (that Firefox refuses to support H.264); and that video can be delivered
quite satisfactorily via HTML5, without Flash.

~~~
tolmasky
I believe we are confusing what we are discussing. It does no good to take
someone's words out of context and display them in a political-style sound
byte, as seems to be the case here. In every one of my posts I have always
said that HTML 5 _will be_ strictly better, but that Adobe's CTO was
absolutely correct that currently (and unless the trajectory changes in the
future too), we will be jettisoned backwards into a world where we have to
create multiple versions of things.

We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video
on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the
current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not
effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium
traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked
on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have
to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on
switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing
intelligently.

The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory.
We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think
"what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is
not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673> . However, I can see that there
exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid
that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of
people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to
"HTML5").

Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and
unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are
religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that
ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the
emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just
like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is
BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the
right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works...
everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your
answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved.

The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but
tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people
these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use
it to fix it.

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awa
To quote what Adobe exactly said: "Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the
Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common
format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to
the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

Ofcourse saying "Back to the dark ages of video due to incompatibility issues"
in headline doesn't generate clicks.

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StrawberryFrog
Or will HTML 5 consign Adobe to the dark ages?

~~~
sailormoon
I don't know why Adobe's clinging to Flash so tenaciously anyway. They can't
make _that_ much money from it and it always seemed a little tangential to
their core competencies of making graphics/DTP software. It's not like they
put a lot of effort into it or anything; it has sucked, badly, for years.

Let it go, Adobe. All things must end.

~~~
mbreese
After looking briefly at their 2009Q4 conference call transcript, they
reported "Platforms" (Flash) revenue at around $47 million and "Creative
solutions" (photoshop, etc) around $430m out of ~ $750m total. I'm not sure if
you can cleanly separate out how much Flash is worth to them, since I'm sure
part of that Creative solutions revenue is for Flash authoring tools.

[http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/q409Script...](http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/q409Script.pdf)

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kevingadd
I'm all for the dark ages if it means I might finally get vertical synced
video playback (which even Flash 10 still cannot do, so I get to enjoy obvious
screen tearing in hulu, youtube and amazon videos).

The fact that Adobe continues to ignore details like vsync makes me wonder if
they even know what a good video playback experience would look like.

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dirtbox
While Flash is pretty awful, I think it's plain the only reason Apple doesn't
want it on their devices is because it allows for functionality that Apple
don't want you to access without you paying them.
<http://listen.grooveshark.com/>, for example, completely voids any reason to
pay for music over iTunes. Not to mention the thousands of games and other
content that offers an alternative on their proprietary store front hardware.

~~~
frozendevil
Yes, because there're aren't Last.fm and Pandora apps, not to mention
thousands of games, for free in the app store. The app store that comes free
on the hardware. And I totally bought every singe one of the 9,358 songs in my
library from the iTunes store.

Say what you want about Apple's approval policies or how the iPad is going to
kill babies because it's closed, but the lack of flash is clearly a
performance/user experience decision over a political one.

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mrclark411
Is there an HTML5 alternative to vector graphics? Even if HTML5 take down
flash video, will we all still have the flash plugin for games and other
interactive uses?

(or will we just write all that crazy stuff in the new javascript libraries:
<http://raphaeljs.com/scape/>)

~~~
bartl
Uh, SVG?

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rubymaverick
Adobe could fix almost all of this by open sourcing the Flash Player.
<http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Projects>

~~~
hyperbolist
<http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/winer_flash_open_standards>

quote: _But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager —
a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if
Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like
anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it
was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to
or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features._

~~~
wglb
And according to a blog of one of the flash development team working on moving
it to 64 bits, there is also a lot of asm there.

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headShrinker
Adobe Flash is simply not a viable option. period.
<http://fritzw.com/media/misc/flash2.jpg>

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maxharris
See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1096474>

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benkant
They have a point, but it's more Mozilla (and Microsoft's) fault than anyone
else's.

