

Adobe Releases a HTML5 Video Player (with Flash fallback) - vital101
http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2010/10/adobe-announces-the-html5-video-player-widget.html

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radley
It's the Kaltura player:

<http://www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5/>

I'm not sure what part Adobe played - all of the code is Kaltura's, and the
widget itself refers to their site. I think the "released" action is that they
added it to their Widget Browser. Woot.

It's not clear, but the the Widget Browser is a separate AIR app - it's not
built-in or part of Dreamweaver. Also, the video the author suggests to watch
actually takes you to a teaser; you have to have an account to view it.

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snprbob86
I think that Adobe is finally realizing that their value is in their tools,
not in their platforms. Photoshop makes _lots_ of money and doesn't have a
platform aspect. The win-win strategy for both Adobe and the Web at large is
to provide a killer Creative Suite that works seamlessly across devices.

~~~
radley
Adobe doesn't have anything against HTML5 - they've been adding bits to
Dreamweaver and other CS products over the past year. Like Flash, most of you
don't use Dreamweaver nor Creative Suite so naturally you wouldn't know this.

I understand that a large (if not just _loud_ ) portion of HN doesn't like
Flash nor develop for it. But as such, what you're saying is inherently an
outsider's perspective and thus potentially inaccurate and unqualified.

Flash is different; it's not what you expect nor wish it to be. That's it. It
serves a different purpose. For those that _do_ use Flash, it does that
purpose very well.

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snprbob86
I'm going to assume that by "you", _you_ mean "the collective you of Hacker
News" and not _me_.

However, even with that assumption: I've worked with Flash before. I have
nothing inherently against Flash, personally. In fact, I quite like Flash when
it comes to its sweet spot of animation. I just view Flash as a means to an
end; HTML5 is another means to a very similar end, so I don't see strategic
value in Adobe owning their own means.

~~~
radley
Adobe has opened up everything that they can for Flash Player. There are only
a few closed portions, such as H.264 video license stuff, that they cannot
share for obvious reasons.

Yes, "you" was a general y'all, not specifically you =)

Edit: Question just came up at session at MAX. Direct from Adobe Flash Product
Manager: there is a lot of code that isn't Adobe's that they had to license.
Also, Flash Player is tiny/tight bit of code ( < 1 MB). It's messy to be very
efficient. Finally, they have opened it up, but Adobe still writes 99% of the
code themselves, so they're not encouraged to open it up more.

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callmeed
So this widget requires Dreamweaver or some Adobe Air thingy. Unless you're a
non-HTML person that's already using Dreamweaver (maybe at a college or
something), this seems a lot less attractive than video-js or any of the other
available HTML5 libraries.

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sp4rki
My main concern with Adobe is that it seemed to me that they where more
concerned (though rightfully so... they are a for profit company after all)
with milking every last dollar out of Flash evangelizing it's used
_everywhere._ They seem to have listened to the pleas of web designers
everywhere now to embrace the new open standards, and that's great in my book.
Now we need to get rid of Adobe Air, and leave Flash as a tool for animation
as it was purputed in the past.

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Tyrant505
I'm not sure of Adobe's intentions but it's(from our perspective) in their
best interest to focus on not fighting web trends and create the tools to
facilitate them instead. Flash has evolved, but it's far from being open
enough for the internet to enable it further. The future? It seems to me the
beast will return from whence it came, specific and isolated, "flash!"

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armandososa
If I was Adobe I'll say the opposite. That it falls back _to_ HTML5.

Sounds like they are accepting that Flash is on its way out.

~~~
LaGrange
Why shouldn't they? They don't sell Flash player, they sell Adobe Flash
described as "Create web designs and online experiences complete with
interactive content, exceptional typography, high-quality video, and smooth
animation for truly engaging web experiences," not "Create .swf files".

So, while faster HTML5 adoption would give them less time to adapt (therefore,
they say that HTML5 is "not ready" -- honestly, true:
[http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/complete/c...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/complete/commands.html#devices)), they need to adapt and show that
they're adapting -- because otherwise the creatives that are currently using
Flash could start considering options (currently few, but that too can
change).

Something like "well, by the time iPad is too popular for flash-based websites
to be viable, we will allow you to make HTML5, so stop worrying about that".

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Raphael_Amiard
The more i think about it, the more clever the idea of flash using HTML5 as a
backend sounds from adobe's perspective. In the (very) long term, it would
remove a big maintenance responsability from them, and put part of this weight
on the browser's engine shoulders.

They wouldn't have to bear with the vocal linux and mac crowds saying their
player sucks, for once, and their stuff would play on other platforms too.

I think Adobe realizes this. The problem is that Javascript
performance/graphic performance isn't there yet.

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joubert
Wait, you have to run an Air app in order to download an HTML5 widget?

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dbrannan
As it should be done - amen!

~~~
MikeCapone
I can't help but wonder if there's a catch. Has anyone had a chance to look at
the code? Any bad surprises?

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mahmud
Adobe willfully open sourced the ActionScript engine that runs its flash
player, and donated it to the Mozilla foundation, under MIT license. If you
run Firefox, you have been running Adobe code for a few years now. Did you see
a catch? where you ever prompted to buy Acrobat Writer or an Omniture
subscription? Don't think so :-)

It's really time developers added Adobe to their "friends" list, imo.

~~~
MikeCapone
> It's really time developers added Adobe to their "friends" list, imo.

I'm not a developer. As a user, I'll add Adobe to my "friends" list as soon as
they have a decent implementation of Flash for OS X that doesn't take tons of
memory and CPU cycles.

Flash is the only thing that can make me restart Chrome because it becomes a
resource hog...

~~~
mahmud
The research on this has been done, a few years ago, by professors in Ireland
and Austria. Adobe is one VM upgrade away from being on-par with
Android/Dalvik, SquirrelFish and LuaJit, in terms of performance.

Adobe already has the technology to improve performance under their noses, but
I don't know what is taking them so long. But I can tell you this: once they
implement the already _published_ fixes, you can expect at least 60%
performance improvement in Flash player, by my calculations ..

\-- edit, removed irrelevant facts.

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mikeknoop
So, elephant in the room, did Apple cause this?

~~~
mahmud
Adobe has _always_ been committed to open standards.

I am not affiliated, not paid by them, and don't know anybody there; so I am
fit to say this. Adobe is a force of good and _very_ much committed to
openness.

Anyone who runs Firefox and bashes Adobe is just being a troll, if not a vile
hypocrite. They're doing their part; sometimes they're slow to act, because
they're a dumb tool vendor at heart, but when they get around to it, they tend
to do good things.

No one should take the credit for Adobe's openness other than Adobe itself.

~~~
bryansum
Could you provide some more context to your statements? What does Firefox have
to do with Adobe?

~~~
mahmud
Adobe gave their ActionScript engine away to Mozilla foundation under MIT
license. Though it's no longer used, except for NanoJit.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28JavaScript_engine%29>

