Flash Player 9 Gets H.264 Support

ReadWriteWeb alerts us to the release later today of Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2, codenamed Moviestar, which will support H.264 standard video as well as High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) and other improvements. Adobe engineer Tinic Uro, who works on the Flash Player, has more technical detail on his blog.

Comments

Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

So is this the corresponding software support behind YouTube's earlier announcement that they'll be serving H.264?

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[JeremyBanks]

I figured that as well, but even if they take advantage of that, they'll need to check what version the user has and serve content accordingly, because obviously this update won't be everywhere at once.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Fozzyuw]

So is this the corresponding software support behind YouTube's earlier announcement that they'll be serving H.264?

Speaking of YouTube and H.264, I've been trying to get a grasp on this new Flash movie player thing (ala YouTube) vs. using the old 'plug-in' style of WMA or QuickTime. What's the best format to be using for website video these days? I read that it's H.264 because YouTube is doing it, but I cannot seem to find an explanation for different formats and how they're used on the web. What's the old way of doing it vs the new way?

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[holysin]

Really it depends on your goals. h.264 could (in theory at least) produce smaller files for the same quality video, so the server would send less data. Always a plus if you're paying for your pipe. But as other posters have pointed out, how long will it take for most people to upgrade flash versions? My guess, if youtube starts using only the latest version of flash, and "suggests" that the users do so too, well, then the users will do so.

So, in a nutshell, I'd say use h.264 and ask whatever users you have that aren't youtube addicts to upgrade nicely. You might save some money (and heck, if they have pay for play connections, the users will too ;-) )

(Note that this advice assumes you're not serving up HD content.)

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[holysin]

Erm, also the above advice assumes you aren't going to be posting video until the release comes out. It can be a bit rude to ask your users to use beta software ;-)

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[PortHaven]

Isn't the non-beta release already out?

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[assassinator42]

And if it's impossible to upgrade? Say, if you're using a device, like the Wii. I don't believe Adobe offers Flash 9 for devices yet.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[sremick]

"how long will it take for most people to upgrade flash versions?"

I'll update Flash once Adobe gives me a version that works. For now, I'm stuck with version 7 for a different OS, thunked in with some hacked-up compatibility layer. Every day, more and more websites are inaccessible to me.

Flash is bane on the internet, giving a proprietary stranglehold to a single commercial company. It turns Adobe into another Microsoft and Flash becomes its "IE"... the more people they can get to use Flash, the more control they have over the keys to the internet, granting them only to whatever OS and browsers they feel like producing Flash plugins for.

Little of what Flash is used for even requires Flash and could be done with modern OS-agnostic DHTML. Sadly, too many web designers are sucking Adobe's dipstick.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[beckerist]

and considering the effort required to upgrade ANY activex control now literally consists of a click and restart of the browser, I don't see how this couldn't be put into widespread use ASAP.

I've found H.264 is a tad bit fuzzier on my LCD TV during high-action scenes than Xvid (my reference is with the show Firefly) but given the difference in filesize, I'll never be one to complain!

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the stack, it seems more likely that this is for the iPhone. H.264, AAC, mp4 container formats...again, just a guess on my anonymous cowardly part..

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is bane on the internet

i'm sure we've all noticed the way in which the ignorant flash bashers round here have gone a bit quiet lately - or maybe they're just getting old and dying out?

this kind of news will hopefully serve as a nice cup of "shut the fuck up" to the remaining few cunts that just don't get it.

now you toddle on back to the sidelines of the internet where you can get on with your irrelevant heckling. fag.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Tumbleweed]

h.264 is a codec, not a file format, so you can (now) have h.264 encoded Flash videos in addition to h.264 encoded AVIs, MOVs, etc., which doesn't really help you to decide on a format. FYI.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Skapare]

... and ask whatever users you have that aren't youtube addicts to upgrade nicely.

And be sure to point them where they can get a copy of Flash 9 based on whatever OS they are using, as discovered by parsing the User Agent or other data.

(Note that this advice assumes you're not serving up HD content.)

Why? Are you saying that Flash 9 won't support HD?

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Skapare]

Little of what Flash is used for even requires Flash and could be done with modern OS-agnostic DHTML. Sadly, too many web designers are sucking Adobe's dipstick.

All we need is library code to support H.264 and a plug-in for Firefox for each OS.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Chandon Seldon]

I've found H.264 is a tad bit fuzzier on my LCD TV during high-action scenes than Xvid (my reference is with the show Firefly) but given the difference in filesize, I'll never be one to complain!

Saying that the quality is different at different file sizes is not interesting. What is the quality like at *the same* file sizes? What are the file sizes like at the same quality?

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be a bit rude^H^H^H^H evil to ask your users to use beta software

Fixed that.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Azureflare]

Wait, what OS are you using? You know Flash 9 is available for linux, right? And, coincidentally, works a lot better than 7.

It would have been helpful if you mentioned what OS you're using...

Otherwise, I totally agree. Flash is pretty evil and developers tend to rely on it far too heavily for things that are more appropriate for DHTML. Still, there are some pretty nice things it can do in some circumstances. Personally, I'd prefer Flash to Silverlight.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[PitaBred]

7? I've got 9 thunked in with a 32->64bit plugin wrapper, but it seems to work alright for me. Comes by default in the Feisty repos, too.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[sremick]

Well, I use FreeBSD (thought it'd be apparent from my URL for those truly curious).

I specifically didn't mention it because my point was to critique Adobe and the issues with Flash, not to come off as a FreeBSD fanboy. The issues here are the same regardless if you use FreeBSD or any OS that is not Windows/Mac/Linux. The web shouldn't be limited solely to those OSes that Adobe feels like producing a plugin for.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I block windows from all my sites.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nokia N800 runs Flash 9 on an ARM processor (AFAIK the only device to do so), so at least it's possible.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really it depends on your goals. h.264 could (in theory at least) produce smaller files for the same quality video, so the server would send less data. Always a plus if you're paying for your pipe. But as other posters have pointed out, how long will it take for most people to upgrade flash versions? My guess, if youtube starts using only the latest version of flash, and "suggests" that the users do so too, well, then the users will do so.

So, in a nutshell, I'd say use h.264 and ask whatever users you have that aren't youtube addicts to upgrade nicely. You might save some money (and heck, if they have pay for play connections, the users will too ;-) )

(Note that this advice assumes you're not serving up HD content.) I can't give any names but just 3 days ago, I made a legal snip to use in a multimedia enabled site. Same content, roughly same size (about 50 pixels difference). H264=2 mb , latest technology startup produced flash from original mpeg 2 (same source)=7 MB. I enabled everything such as 2 pass etc. The content is the first generation aka not "ripped from tv" or a "pirate" content with huge artifacts. It was just made very high bandwidth mpeg 2 from original SD non compressed source video to transport.

If they would end up in H264, at least a documented and free software enabled (ffmpeg) content, why did people get forced to use VPC , a companies product who is so close to MS so they don't even offer a OS X Quicktime authoring component?

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[beckerist]

My point was that for a file that is a third of the size of the comparison, the quality *was not* a big enough loss that I would throw out that codec. The quality *was not* equal, but the difference was trivial given the enormous difference in filesize.

Linux

[Trip Ericson]

Now let's just hope it doesn't take an additional 6 months for this to make its way into the Linux version. Flash Player 9 for Linux came out some months after Flash Player 9 for Windows/Mac did.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta 1 of this version is already out for linux. Let's hope beta 2 will too.

Re:Linux

[J0nne]

Did you notice any stability improvements aswell? Flash still causes Firefox to crash way too much with the latest non-free 'stable' version...

Re:Linux

[Ed Avis]

Is there no existing free (modulo patent hassle) program to play H.264 videos?

Re:Linux

[jimstapleton]

So that happens in Linux too? I thought it was just a bug in the Linux compatibility layer in FreeBSD.

Re:Linux

[archen]

You mean the "32bit" Linux version. I couldn't care less since (as a 64bit user) I've never HAD a Linux version. If Adobe isn't careful then Microsoft sprinkle (or whatever it's called) may actually take root.

Re:Linux

[morgan_greywolf]

VideoLan and MPlayer. I think xine might support H.264, too, but I'm not sure.

Re:Linux

[Insightfill]

Now let's just hope it doesn't take an additional 6 months for this to make its way into the Linux version. Flash Player 9 for Linux came out some months after Flash Player 9 for Windows/Mac did.

Or, to say nothing of Flash for Linux/PPC, which still hasn't been released. The open-source version is OK, but quite a few sites have a hard-check for version of Flash before giving you anything, and will balk even if you have something "compatible".

Re:Linux

[Knuckles]

I haven't seen this in Ubuntu in years, YMMV.

Re:Linux

[Knuckles]

nspluginwrapper

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't they working on a method to make it so it doesn't matter whether it is 32 bit or 64 bit on a 64 bit system using some "XEmbed" thing so that become a non-issue in the future? (Sorry, I don't remember the specifics, I just remember reading about it somewhere.)

Re:Linux

[amccaf1]

At least we got it eventually... They never did release a version 8.0 of Flash for Linux...

Re:Linux

[Ed Avis]

So... when YouTube switches to H.264, does that mean that the Flash player will no longer be necessary? Will MPlayer, for example, be able to play videos straight from the site?

Re:Linux

[J0nne]

It happens to me regularely, especially when watching flv video's, especially if you close a tab while the video's still playing. I've installed flashblock which helps a bit as now only video's that I *really want* get loaded.

Re:Linux

[toad3k]

I was having this problem too and updated to the latest experimental linux versions. I had thought the problem was persisting but I haven't had a single freezup for weeks, so it must have worked or at least dramatically lowered occurances.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You can already do this with youtube-dl. Mplayer plays the downloaded .flv file just fine on my Linux PowerPC box ( = no binary codecs needed).

I wonder why YouTube (and all the copies) don't provide a direct link to the .flv file.

Re:Linux

[teslatug]

No kidding, look at all of these reports: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksear ch=flash+crash

Re:Linux

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

With Gnash now supporting YouTube, and Silverlight on the horizon, Adobe Flash is under serious threat of becoming irrelevant. Frankly, I want to see that day happen. It may finally spur Adobe to try and get the support of the users by giving us proper 64-bit support or (God forbid) just open-sourcing Flash.

Re:Linux

[j79zlr]

I've noticed that flash on my amd64 box using the nspluginwrapper is quite unstable compared to my other box with is running a P4 and doesn't need the wrapper.

Re:Linux

[smchris]

quite a few sites have a hard-check for version of Flash

I don't know if it's always Adobe's fault. Sister-in-law sent my wife a JibJab link the other day. It only _claims_ that "JibJab requires the latest version of Adobe Flash player". The code actually does a slash-and-burn "if lt IE 7" check.

It didn't play in IE7 on XP running in qemu either (although we could step through the video). Yes, you can play YouTube videos without stuttering on XP in qemu and kqemu with mediocre equipment -- although I'm getting some audio warbling. So I'm assuming many sites like JibJab just aren't expending a lot of resources on alternate browsers and installations much less plug-in versions.

Re:Linux

[baadger]

One of the best advantages I've found is that nspluginwrapper runs Flash out of process and so a Flash messing up doesn't take down your browser session. That said nspluginwrapper may be the cause of a lot of the crashes. Opera I believe also runs all netscape plugins out of process (and it seems to be better at restoring Flash after a failure than nspluginwrapper and Firefox). After many hours of using Opera I often see operapluginwrapper crashes in dmesg output.

Even so, i'm a little pissed that Adobe are pushing out new features before they've even fixed their gaping lack of support for x86_64.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Xine has it's own codec plugin architecture. Each decoder plugin is dynamically loaded and uses the relevant codec libraries (such as x264) it needs. xine-lib comes with an ffmpeg plugin that links against ffmpeg (or more specifically libavcodec) which is the powerhouse behind most mplayer decoding.

In short, although your system can have versions of mplayer and ffmpeg of different ages, if mplayer will play it, xine usually will. So yes, xine based players should handle H.264.

Windows users can of course install ffdshow

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no. Adobe Flash isn't suddenly going to magically go away if Gnash ever actually works correctly.

To defeat Flash, you'd need a easy to use, compelling "Gnash studio" and that's not happening anytime soon. Especially considering Flex 2 is open source...and you can use Eclipse to do Flash stuff...

Re:Linux

[Joe Tie.]

And we're still waiting for a flash that can actually be used with beryl/compiz enabled, a standalone player, or air support.

Re:Linux

[ncc74656]

I've noticed that flash on my amd64 box using the nspluginwrapper is quite unstable compared to my other box with is running a P4 and doesn't need the wrapper.

It used to be unreliable for me, but nspluginwrapper has worked well for me the past few months. What version are you using? I'm using 0.9.91.4, with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Gentoo.

Re:Linux

[j79zlr]

I am using Gentoo as well. Actually it doesn't really crash the browser, but it does sometimes decide to just stop working and you have to restart the browser for it to work again.

i'm a loser

[Anonymous Coward]

omg first?

Ads

[QuantumPion]

Sweet, now we can be annoyed by advertisements in HD, at 100x the bandwidth!

Re:Ads

[WPIDalamar]

People bitching about Flash because of ads is like people bitching about C because of viruses.

Re:Ads

[timmarhy]

actually, this would require less bandwidth then before given the higher compression of h.264

what you can look forward to however, is the same ads in HD consuming your memory and cpu like never before as your pc attempts to cope with a multitude of h.264 video.

Re:Ads

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Thank you! Finally, a succinct reply to those trolls... Well said!!

Re:Ads

[ewl1217]

Right... because we have to put up with viruses on every web page we go to...

If you're going to make an analogy, you should come up with a better one. Sure, viruses may use C, but (if you're smart) you'll never run into one. Annoying Flash ads, on the other hand, are commonplace on many legitimate sites. Now before somebody screams "Adblock!", just remember that ads should be useful and relevant, not resource-intensive and obtrusive.

Re:Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually bitching about C because of viruses would be rather more valid and I'm always surprised more people haven't got annoyed about it yet. Many, many security exploits stem from buffer overflow errors that are an intrinsic hazard to the way C works. Viruses in later languages, like Java or C# say, are much rarer and tend to be exploiting facets of the environment that were written in C. So the current viral nightmare that many of us have to deal with one way or another day after day could all be avoided if we hadn't got stuck with the wrong high language to do systems development on.

Re:Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, and the world should be a better place.

Re:Ads

[pohl]

comparing Flash to C is like comparing MSN Messenger Protocol to XMPP.

Re:Ads

[MrNaz]

Bad analogies are like slightly overripe peaches.

Re:Ads

[DrXym]

People bitching about Flash because of ads is like people bitching about C because of viruses.

The main uses of Flash thus far have been:

• Adverts. Almost every site has a flash ad or two
• Promo sites for movies, games etc.
• Video players. YouTube etc. A fairly recent phenomena

It's not hard to see why people hate Flash. Sure it might eventually herald an age of Rich Internet Applications with Flex etc. but it's no exaggeration to say that most user's experiences of it are overwhelmingly negative due to its association with adverts.

A fun fact about Flash is that it has things called shared objects which are just like cookies but managed entirely separately and stored in the user's app data folder, e.g. %APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects. Doubleclick and Google must bust a gut when they hear people saying they wipe their cookies because I bet they never think to wipe their shared objects. Sure you can eventually discover this panel to control them (a bit) but Adobe haven't fallen over themselves to make it easy to find or control these settings. It seems they know which side their bread is buttered on.

Re:Ads

[visualight]

Defending Flash is like defending annoying advertisements.

Re:Ads

[kalaf]

It's a good analogy. Flash is a tool, like C, and an ad is an application, just like a virus. It's not Flash's fault that it's the best solution for animation on the web right now, and it's not Flash's fault advertisers recognize that fact.

If it was the technology that's the problem then a 15 second 24fps 300x250 animated GIF would solve it.

Re:Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the matter with you? Did you read the post. Flash was not compared to C, their potential for use/abuse were compared. It was an analogy, and a decent one at that. You seem to be over thinking this one a bit - Don't let that low UID get to your head...

Re:Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

People bitching about Flash because of ads is like people bitching about the web because of Flash...

They just haven't installed noscript. Don't worry, you can still bitch about firefox crashing.

Re:Ads

[toriver]

At least the analogies don't involve cars. Remember: Car analogies are the last resort of the incompetent!

T minus...

[MrNemesis]

Linux support coming in 1,000,000... 999,999... 999,998...

Actually, a million seconds is less than two weeks, that's far too quick!

Re:T minus...

[jimstapleton]

1,000,000 bottles of beer on the wall? It'll take a while to sing *THAT* song...

Re:T minus...

[MrNemesis]

A million bottles of beer? Don't give Macrom^H^H^H^H^H^H Adobe's coders any more ideas...! ;)

Re:T minus...

[TheRaven64]

If Flash came with a million bottles of beer, I'd download it. Unless it was American macrobrewery beer...

Meanwhile...

[phrasebook]

Various choices I've recently made (like using amd64, and dumping Firefox for Konqueror) mean that I've not been using a Flash player at all. So far, I've missed out on things like:

* The BMW website
* Countless links to clips on Youtube
* Advertising banners
* Homestar runner

Some of these things might have been mildly useful, but I can't say I really miss any of it. I'm not sure having the Flash player installed is worth the annoyance and distraction it usually ends up driving me to. If I'm honest, Flash player has seen the most use when I've been bored, depressed, procrastinating or similar.

I'm quite enjoying being Flash-free.

Re:Meanwhile...

[Delkster]

I use flashblock with Firefox. That mostly gives me the advantages of having Flash without the disadvantages (intrusive flash banners etc.) because I get flash but only when I explicitly request it.

Of course browsing sites that make extensive use of flash, particularly in form of several separate flash objects on the same page, are still a pain to use because you may have to click on every one of them in order to get a usable page. Flashblock allows site whitelisting, though, which makes that more bearable.

Re:Meanwhile...

[jlarocco]

Various choices I've recently made (like using amd64, and dumping Firefox for Konqueror) mean that I've not been using a Flash player at all. So far, I've missed out on things like:

* The BMW website
* Countless links to clips on Youtube
* Advertising banners
* Homestar runner

I'm running 64-bit Linux, and I have Flash working in Konqueror just fine.

Install NSPluginWrapper, konqueror-nsplugins, and the Flash plugin, then go into the "Plugins" section of Konqueror's preferences, and click "Scan for new Plugins".

Once it's setup, it's trivial to disable it on most sites. Also, Konqueror has a builtin ad-blocker that works a lot better than just turning off Flash.

Some of these things might have been mildly useful, but I can't say I really miss any of it. I'm not sure having the Flash player installed is worth the annoyance and distraction it usually ends up driving me to. If I'm honest, Flash player has seen the most use when I've been bored, depressed, procrastinating or similar.

I agree that the benefit of Flash is questionable, but there's no technical reason you can't use it if you want to.

I'm quite enjoying being Flash-free.

Great, but don't make it sound like software limits are preventing you from using it.

Re:Meanwhile...

[teg]

No flash doesn't really work anymore - unfortunately. For most of the purposes people are using it, it's just the wrong thing...

But fortunately, with FireFox, you can have your cake and eat it too - install the flash plugin and flashblock. Flashblock is an extension that will show an icon for all flash content, but will allow you to click on it to start the flash app if it's something you need. Sites can be whitelisted too, so that e.g. every youtube link will work, but the annoying commercials everywhere aren't shown.

Re:Meanwhile...

[Random BedHead Ed]

You've had trouble installing Flash huh? Have you tried the instructions in this video?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=uIfSz_-LDdg

Re:Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some very useful sites out there that use Flash. Eventually you're going to want a tutorial or something from YouTube, it's great for showing and teaching hands-on stuff.

There is a huge push right now to develop full applications in Flash and I think you're going to see more and more of that. That is unless the dumbass browser developers finally get their act together and write a decent (fast) Javascript and display engine.

Ever heard of FlashBlock? You can still see the Flash you want while everything else is blocked by default. Oh, sorry, I see you're using Konqueror... <snicker>

Re:Meanwhile...

[skeeto]

I also enjoy not having Flash installed, including the free versions (gnash, swfdec, etc). It also allows me to ignore most links that my friends send: "Can't see it. Don't have flash."

However, I do like watching Youtube videos. You can watch those without Flash using youtube-dl. I use it anytime someone sends me a youtube link.

Re:Meanwhile...

[Logic and Reason]

You can download YouTube videos with a tool like this, then play them with mplayer. Yeah, not terribly convenient, but at least it works.

I`m confused

[Salsaman]

I was under the impression that flash 9 was already using h264. If not, then what were they using before ?

Re:I`m confused

[Anonymous Coward]

On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark (H.263).

Re:I`m confused

[Anonymous Coward]

As of flash 8 they were using ON2 VP6, which is pretty good but not an open standard, and also a huge CPU hog. Before that (and it's still supported) they were using Sorenson Squeeze which is a subset of h263.

Re:I`m confused

[Anonymous Coward]

VP6.

Re:I`m confused

[Anonymous Coward]

> I was under the impression that flash 9 was already using h264.
> If not, then what were they using before ?

h.263

You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Nicolas MONNET]

You just need nspluginwrapper.

It's a 64 bit plugin, that spawns a 32 bit shell running the Flash plugin.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Lord Ender]

You can't use a 64 bit browser with nspluginwrapper. Sorry, doesn't cut it.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Seems to be working fine in my 64-bit Firefox (Gentoo, AMD64). AND Konqueror.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Nimey]

O RLY? Seems to work OK with my AMD64 Ubuntu installation.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[SirTalon42]

Yes you can. You get the 32bit version of nspluginwrapper and replace the 64bit one in your install. Since nspluginwrapper is run as a separate process and is simply embedded in the Konqueror window it means you shouldn't have any problems watching flash with the 32bit plugin.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Lord Ender]

Your ubuntu installation can't really be called AMD64 if one of your primary pieces of software, firefox, has been compiled for 32 bit. Flash doesn't work with 64 bit firefox. Do I need to say it again?

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, assuming the user has bothered to build or install an entire lib32.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Nimey]

$ file firefox-bin

firefox-bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

I'd say you're wrong, sport.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you can't.. It works great for me. Built 64bit Firefox from source on Gentoo and I use 32bit Flash plugin.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[NightFears]

Also, gnash has recently matured to the point of being able to play YouTube movies on all supported architectures, including amd64. Well, sort of - in my experience, the version in Ubuntu Feisty repositories is still way too buggy in many ways, including, but not limited to, some of the GUI components misplaced or not working, huge memory leaks (don't leave it overnight) and stopping to load after viewing a dozen of clips. But hey, it's a start.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[MenTaLguY]

Of course it doesn't work in-process. Can't mix 32-bit shared libraries with 64-bit executables. But 32-bit flash does work out-of-process with nspluginwrapper, which works with 64-bit Firefox.

Still no love for us PPC users though :(

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[WhiteWolf666]

You're mistaken.

This used to be true, but is not true in the later versions of nspluginwrapper.

Really, I promise; all of us are running 64-bit builds of Firefox, with 32-bit Flash.

Go check it out.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[icydog]

At this time, mozilla-plugin-gnash works on youtube, at least for Gutsy. Youtube was the one site that I really had to have flash for, and now there's an open-source solution for that!

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: you're not smarter than everyone else, "Lord Ender".

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[ceroklis]

Still no love for us PPC users though :(

I haven't tried it but I am sure you could hack together a solution by combining qemu and nspluginwrapper.

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[MenTaLguY]

I haven't tried it but I am sure you could hack together a solution by combining qemu and nspluginwrapper.

That's ... how you say ... unlikely to run at a usable speed, particularly on my G3. Also it'd mean maintaining an entire VM instance just for the plugin, with the associated memory and disk overhead.

Still no 64 bit

[aim2future]

Maybe I have very old ideas about programming, but... why not fix the fundamental flaws in the software first, before adding features... (I thought it was only the linux 64 bit version missing, but fortunately I was wrong)

Re:Still no 64 bit

[jpea]

because any time that fortune 500 companies are coming to you and asking for other features, those probably take priority over end user needs.

Re:Still no 64 bit

[Nomaxxx]

Yes, this is a real problem! I'll be more than happy when i'll be able to see YouTube videos on my 64-bit Linux! ;-) Seriously, some websites rely too much on flash. That's annoying! No 64-bit support is not serious. It wouldn't happen if Flash was an open technology.

Re:Still no 64 bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Install nspluginwrapper!! Cake + EAT IT.

Re:Still no 64 bit

[Nomaxxx]

Already tried... and failed. BTW, I'm using SeaMonkey. Well... I'll give it another try...

Not bloated enough!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance you Flash guys can add in a Java machine, some new 3D algorithms, and a salami slicer?

Re:Not bloated enough!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me of the time I was fired for sticking my wang in the salami slicer.

She was fired as well.

Re:Not bloated enough!!

[MrNaz]

It really shouldn't be a fireable offense. Unless of course you don't wash your hands before getting back to food preparation.

What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be a dumb question, but what other media players already support H.264?

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Stooshie]

Just to correct you, Flash is a lot more than a media player.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[DrXym]

Videolan, Nero Showtime and Quicktime do to my knowledge. So does the PS3.

The major confusion is that H264 is not just one standard but a loose collection of features bound up in "profiles". A player might support the H264 "main" profile, but not the "high" profile and so on. Then you've got MPEG-4 part 2 which is an earlier but unrelated stanard that DIVX / XVID are implementations of.

It's all quite confusing before even considering DRM and other implementation details. Still, the format is starting to see widespread adoption so the sooner all devices support it the better for everyone.

It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long. I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Laebshade]

There isn't much point in converting xvid/divx/3ivx to h.264 (x264/vc) unless you're just aiming for a smaller file size; no, x264/h264 is for preserving the high quality of a video in a relatively low-size file format. Now that the flash player is getting h.264, I'm hoping it'll get something some might consider more important: mkv support and subtitle support. Ah well, here's to dreams.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long.

I would call this "an overly optimistic projection by someone who doesn't follow the industry very deeply". Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.

I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.

Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting
is kind of like being given a high bit rate MP3 file and then wanting to convert it to Ogg Vorbis in some mistaken belief that doing so will make it "better". Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files and maybe if you do a really good job you can't tell that the quality has dropped, but the video certainly won't be better. Given the lack of standalone H.264 playback devices, I don't know what would be hoped to be gained by this at this time. You'd only end up with a slightly smaller file that is even less likely to be able to be played back on anything but a PC.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[DrXym]

I would call this "an overly optimistic projection by someone who doesn't follow the industry very deeply". Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.

Any entry level PC can manage HD output at 720p and probably higher. I really don't see the issue with a DVD player offering the same when the chances are it would be hardware assisted. Even a PSP can manage H264/AVC main at SD resolutions. We're already seeing HDMI equipped upscaling DVD players. Players that read and play H264 files cannot be that far behind. If Apple can flog an iTV which is basically an HD H264 playback device then cheaper devices are clearly not far off.

Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting

I want it because because DiVX was a good format but it's becoming obsolete. If it were possible to convert those files while preserving as much as possible of the data , e.g. B & I frames, the quality of the image might be better than completely re-encoding it. It would also be quicker to convert them, possibly even allowing the likes of Nero Home to transcode them on the fly. That is why I wondered aloud if you could produce a mostly lossless conversion.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[DrXym]

There isn't much point in converting xvid/divx/3ivx to h.264 (x264/vc) unless you're just aiming for a smaller file size; no, x264/h264 is for preserving the high quality of a video in a relatively low-size file format. Now that the flash player is getting h.264, I'm hoping it'll get something some might consider more important: mkv support and subtitle support. Ah well, here's to dreams.

I want to convert because the industry appears to be ignoring MPEG-4 SP/ASP and the implementations of it. For example my PS3 doesn't not support DiVX. While I could workaround this issue by firing up Linux, I'd prefer if there was a way to almost losslessly convert the format from one to the other. We all know that you could reencode the movie by decoding it one frame at a time and then reencoding it. But I am wondering if there is a way to strip the B/I frames and anything out of the data stream and save them straight into H264. Even if that means changing structures around. Not only would it mean a higher quality conversion, but it would be faster too and ideally suited for transcoding or conversion en masse.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264.

Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files

What?

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Insightfill]

Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.

Given that a little iPod can do the baseline profile at 640x480, I can't think that 1080 would entail a WHOLE LOT more work. OK, admittedly, it's ~4x the resolution, but we are talking about a little device. The specs for the AppleTV device say it will do 1280x1024 of h.264, so I don't think a DVD player with 1080 is out of line.

I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.

Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see.

I think the GP probably has a large collection of CDs of things encoded in DivX, and is just planning ahead to the stage of being able to easily watch those on a set-top box. From the quote, they understand that there MAY be some loss, but are willing to take a little for the convenience of not having to re-encode everything. They're probably hoping that the formats are close enough that there's a simple transform or something (a la XVID/DIVX/MPEG4 being related), but they're much different than that.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Karrde712]

no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long H.264 is the video standard used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray high-definition disc formats. Any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player already has support for accelerated H.264 playback.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Phil246]

I want it because because DiVX was a good format but it's becoming obsolete. If it were possible to convert those files while preserving as much as possible of the data , e.g. B & I frames, the quality of the image might be better than completely re-encoding it. It would also be quicker to convert them, possibly even allowing the likes of Nero Home to transcode them on the fly. That is why I wondered aloud if you could produce a mostly lossless conversion.

divx is MPEG-4 no?
There are plenty of codec libraries which can handle that, its hardly going to go the way of the dodo. MPEG-1 is still around, and playable after all and thats from the VCD era; around the early 1990s.

When you transcode from one lossy format, into another there is no way that the quality of the image will be improved whatsoever.
data is thrown away, data that can not be recovered or magically made to appear out of thin air so that the image quality can be better. It would be better to re-encode from the original source where there is more data available for the codec to work on. Some perform better then others after all and may be able to compress more of the data then divx could without throwing some away.

If you want as little data to be lost as possible when transcoding, then re-encode it into a format that is lossless (huffyuv?) or even to straight avi frames. The tradeoff is that the files become much much larger, and you will not gain any more quality then was in the original divx'd version.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[diamondsw]

There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264

Except for device support. iPods, AppleTV, and anything that supports this in the future as it gets more popular. Nevermind that most of our Divx content is in a craptastic container format (AVI).

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[DrXym]

divx is MPEG-4 no? There are plenty of codec libraries which can handle that, its hardly going to go the way of the dodo. MPEG-1 is still around, and playable after all and thats from the VCD era; around the early 1990s.

There is no single standard called MPEG-4. DiVX is an implementation of MPEG-4 Level 2 ASP. This is a very specific codec, on top of which DiVX has its own media container format. The container is how the data is stored as a file, and the container might interleave the data with other kinds of data. For example DiVX specifies extensions for subtitles and other things.

H264/AVC is MPEG-4 Level 10. It also has some different container formats, but more importantly it's an entirely different codec. Despite that, the two standards will share certain similarities might that allow some data to be preserved during conversion. I am wondering as someone not acquainted with the details if there is any feasibility to this.

But even considering DiVX as MPEG-4 ASP, it does not imply MPEG-4 ASP capable devices can read DiVX because the file format is independent of the encoding. At the very least a tool might be required to strip DiVX content out of it's proprietary container format. There is no guarantee that a device that supports even ASP is going to play DiVX movies.

On top of that MPEG-4 SP & ASP are becoming obsolete. They're stop-gaps who've run their course. Hardware has moved onto H264 yet people are left with ripped content in the old format. Most hardware does not support XVid / DiVX container formats. Sony, MS & Apple seem disinclined to support those formats, probably for accusations that they're supporting piracy, as well as hindering adoption of H264. If you have a device that only supports H264 you need to be able to convert files to H264.

When you transcode from one lossy format, into another there is no way that the quality of the image will be improved whatsoever. data is thrown away, data that can not be recovered or magically made to appear out of thin air so that the image quality can be better. It would be better to re-encode from the original source where there is more data available for the codec to work on. Some perform better then others after all and may be able to compress more of the data then divx could without throwing some away.

No one ever said any different. I'm sure I could reencode all 30 movies I currently have in DiVX, if I have a spare month of time to do it. I'd just prefer not to if at all possible.

If you want as little data to be lost as possible when transcoding, then re-encode it into a format that is lossless (huffyuv?) or even to straight avi frames. The tradeoff is that the files become much much larger, and you will not gain any more quality then was in the original divx'd version.

I want to convert DiVX to H264, not some other format. I want to do this as losslessly as possible. I am wondering aloud if there is a way to convert data that does not involve (as much) encoding. Obviously I could just reencode them but I want to know if any data can be saved, speeding up conversion in the process. This is my question.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Telvin_3d]

Minor note. 1080p is 6.75x the resolution of 640x480. (1920*1080=2073600)/(640*480=307200)=6.75
That's a lot of extra pixels.

For a better way to get the mind around the difference, go tot apple's quicktime site and look at the downloads for the HD movie trailers. compare the file size for the 480p and the 1080p. For the Last Legion trailer the difference is 49 MB vs. 150 MB. That's lots of extra info to process. http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelastleg ion/hd/

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

Both HDDVD and BLU-RAY already have support for mpeg-4 avc (H.264) and quite a few discs have been released in both formats with H.264 video. This is a whole diffrent thing than divx/xvid compability on dvd players. H.264 is also used by a few broadcast companys, so there is a reason for people wanting to playback their captured streams on standalone aswell.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Insightfill]

Minor note. 1080p is 6.75x the resolution of 640x480. (1920*1080=2073600)/(640*480=307200)=6.75 That's a lot of extra pixels.

For a better way to get the mind around the difference, go tot apple's quicktime site and look at the downloads for the HD movie trailers. compare the file size for the 480p and the 1080p. For the Last Legion trailer the difference is 49 MB vs. 150 MB. That's lots of extra info to process. http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelastleg ion/hd/

Granted, 1080 is 6.75 times bigger - my x4 figure compared to 640x480 was a "back-of-the-envelope" variety. Still, the fact that the built-in iPod (dedicated) chip can do 1/6th the work, and that the Apple TV can do MORE with an Intel chip means it's not out of reach for a reasonable price.

Of course, with a dedicated DVD player costing under $30 (or even $20 if you look), I have a feeling that a dedicated H.264 player might not get THAT cheap. IIRC, $9 of every DVD player is actually licensing costs.

Also: I'll grant your point on this, esp. owing as to the "system recommendations" page linked from your page: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/recommenda tions.html WOW! A Pentium D at 3GHz and a 64MB video card to watch a 1080p video!

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[mahlerfan999]

Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. That's funny because the $40 magnavox player at walmart that I bought last week has divx and mpeg-2 support. Gee whiz that was difficult.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[funkatron]

I doubt that the licencing is that much. If it was then surely someone would just stick vlc or mplayer in a box with a drive and sell it for $10.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[tknd]

There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264.

You can gain free hard disk space as a trade off for a small but not noticeable loss in quality and increased processing power required to play the media.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[poulbailey]

What?

Read the rest of the sentence, Captain ADD:

Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files and maybe if you do a really good job you can't tell that the quality has dropped, but the video certainly won't be better.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the rest of the sentence, Captain ADD:

Perhaps you should learn what the word "nothing" means before you flame other people.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Insightfill]

I doubt that the licencing is that much ($20). If it was then surely someone would just stick vlc or mplayer in a box with a drive and sell it for $10.

Yes, but that would be "under the table." Wiki says $20/player while another source shows min $4/player for the DVD spec alone. MP3, JPG, VCD, etc. support each have their own fees.

Here's another article on fees: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050120A2004.html Quote: "Xinhua Online cited the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) as indicating that China produces 60 million DVD players and exports 45-50 million of them a year, with the exported DVD players subject to a royalty charge of US$20 per player."

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[illumin8]

I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.

There is no way to convert from one lossy format to another lossy format without losing some content. It's like the second law of thermodynamics, but for data... The data just isn't there so it can't be made up on the fly.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[gzunk]

I doubt that you could save much. Although H264 is called MPEG-4 Part 10, and it uses the same ideas (transform, motion compensation, quantization) it uses very different algorithms to perform each step. Probably the best candidates are the motion vectors (how a block of 8x8 pixels moves over time) even then, DivX is limited to 8x8 blocks, whereas H264 can do different sized blocks (8x16, 16x16) if that matches the motion better - so you lose one of the big benefits of H264 by re-using the motion vectors.

I'd be tempted to do the re-code though. H264 should be able to give you at least a 25% improvement in file size for the same perceived quality. Depends on what you want though. I regularly recode MPEG-2 as H264 with quite a spectacular reduction in file size, and (to my eyes) a minimal reduction in quality.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[nogginthenog]

I'm pretty sure H.264 support in Videolan comes from ffmpeg library.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.

Umm, I think you're the one who isn't paying attention. Demand for hardware H.264 decoders has exploded, and the market is maturing now. H.264 decoders go into mobile phones, and into the newer Blu-ray and HD DVD players (the originals did their decoding in software on glorified PCs, which is one reason why they were so expensive and unresponsive). And, surprise surprise, Blu-ray and HD DVD both support H.264 decoding at least at 1080i.

Whether the format appears in SD DVD players remains to be seen, of course. One of the HD formats might catch on, in which case why do you need H.264 playback in a SD player? On the other hand, things like iPod video might make it popular to put H.264 on regular DVDs, in which case a market will emerge. Warner Brothers proposed an DVD-9-based HD standard using the better codecs, although that apparently went nowhere.

The technology is certainly there, and it's only a matter of time before it's cheap enough. The question is whether there'll be any demand for it.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[jhol13]

But not HD. Most likely the bit rate is limited to 10Mbit/s and resolution (on disk) to 720x576.

For HD it should be able to handle at least 20Mbit/s and 1280x720 resolution.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[jhol13]

I think the requirements are a bit low, if you compare them to http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/page21.html.

But then, the content is somewhat different.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[DrXym]

Hence the reason I said mostly lossy.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[DrXym]

Oops, I meant mostly lossless.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash supports Timed Text subtitles. SRT support is easy to implement, some players have it (wijering). As for other containers (mkv, avi) - if the codecs are supported you can just remux them to mp4. Frankly I don't see much of a reason for mkv anymore, now that we have mp4. Not to speak of that horrible ogm.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as an XViD container. And when people say DiVX they mean the video codec. Virtually nobody uses the so-called DiVX container, let alone their proprietary bitmapped subtitle format that doubles file sizes and isn't compatible with anything. Ripped movies use the XViD/DiVX codecs (and increasingly x264) but almost always inside avi or mkv containers. Oh, and H264 isn't a container either.

Great to be you.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

But most of the world (and me!) enjoy watching dumb clips on youtube.

That's going to mean we stick with 32 bit firefox for the moment :-(

Re:Great to be you.

[WhiteWolf666]

nspluginwrapper supports 64-bit firefox with 32-bit plugins.

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux-amd64.html

Here's a quote:
nspluginwrapper allows you to use Netscape compatible (NPAPI) plugins on platforms that they were not built on - in this instance, using 32bit browser plugins with x86_64 browsers. This is beta software, and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

not sure if this is true or not

[FudRucker]

Due to a design flaw in ActionScript 3 socket handling, compiled Flash movies are able to scan for open TCP ports on any host reachable from the host running the SWF, bypassing the Flash Player Security Sandbox Model and without the need to rebind DNS.

You can see a proof of concept at the site, and it's quite interesting to watch. This happens inside your firewalled network, just by browsing the internet.

http://hackersblog.itproportal.com/?p=720

Re:not sure if this is true or not

[cortana]

This is CVE-2007-4324.

Who cares?

[*weasel]

Once sites like metacafe and youtube start offering their content via h.264 streams we can ditch flash for video altogether.

Re:Who cares?

[realdodgeman]

No, they are talking about using a new flash version to stream h.264 embedded in flash...

Re:Who cares?

[jellomizer]

I really don't see why this pure hatred of flash. With sure the official versions are not open source. But all in all it is better then what we had before. If you don't remember back in the days of IE 4 and Netscape 4 Every website that wanted to do something a little more advanced then showing a couple of animated gifs, usually had or made their own plug in that worked only for Windows, or sometimes in a rare occurrence there was a plug in that would work on different OS's. Now with flash this isn't the case anymore if you have 1 plugin Flash then you are good to go. It is fast to load and to play even on slow systems. Adobe is rather good about making it available to multiple platforms Windows, Mac, Linux, those are the main OS's which you would expect people to be viewing these type of pages. The player is Free as in Beer (Development tools cost a lot though... But for you flash haters it is a good thing becaue that makes sure that flash use is more limited to people who are professional or aspire to be professional, not just some kid who wants to make an ugly flash to 1337 their friends).

Is it just because because it is Not Open Source?
Is it that you are annoyed because it doesn't work on your obscure OS / hardware, or server hardware which you probably needed to hack just to get a display on it?
Is it just because your a purist for sake of being a purist not caring about the benefit, only focusing on the flash adds?
Or are you just jelious that you didn't make it yourself. And you spent so much time learning how to program Java Applets that you feel ripped off.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.

Imagine if the web became that way, as well. Dark times.

But the H.264 issue is different. Basically Adobe has said, "We are adopting a not-awful codec for our video playing, seeing as how flash video is popular but large distributors of video (YouTube) have shown that they will leave the format to hit the mobile and embedded space if need be.

So now Apple, Adobe, Google, Sony and Toshiba have standardized on QuickTime enclosures (mp4) with H.264 video and AAC audio (when compressed, HD discs can use much less lossy encoding when they want to). How long do WMV and WMF have to live? Now that Flash can play high-quality HD video (and extremely-small-file-size SD video), and preparing with one codec can prepare for everything from phones to HD televisions, what appeal does Microsoft's codecs and containers have? Surely no one can suggest that Windows Media Player has better deployment than Adobe's Flash?

Re:Who cares?

[afidel]

VC1 has significantly lower CPU usage for HD content unless you have a card like the Nvidia 8(5-6)00 series cards with H.264 acceleration.

Re:Who cares?

[visualight]

Speaking not as a developer/producer/streamer but just as someone who sometimes needs to visit a website using Flash:

I resent the lack of control over how individual objects on the page (or "under" the page for that matter) are rendered or not rendered. I grit my teeth every time I right click on a page and get that utterly useless Flash menu.

I don't really care about whether I should have the right to alter the way a page is presented or if the producer should have the right preserve his or her intentions. Bottom line is I don't want my Internet connection to continue devolving into cable tv. I just hate having a single option, "take it they way we want to give it to you". I really do wish that Flash would just die, without Flash SVG would already be mature and well supported everywhere.

So, yeah, every improvement in Flash that promises more Flash websites is "Bad News".

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rational hatred of flash is the flagrant use of it for annoying sound effects and flashy graphics ads.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

Yes, but that's for HD content, which is usually played on a device plugged into a wall socket or with a battery which is itself bigger than most mobile devices.

Power consumption is only a critical factor on mobile devices. VC1 not only doesn't perform well here, but doesn't have great penetration here either.

Re:Who cares?

[DrSkwid]

Then get a better web browser, I choose what flash items I want turned on individually.

Re:Who cares?

[tlhIngan]

I really don't see why this pure hatred of flash. With sure the official versions are not open source. But all in all it is better then what we had before.

[... snip ...]

Is it just because because it is Not Open Source?
Is it that you are annoyed because it doesn't work on your obscure OS / hardware, or server hardware which you probably needed to hack just to get a display on it?
Is it just because your a purist for sake of being a purist not caring about the benefit, only focusing on the flash adds?
Or are you just jelious that you didn't make it yourself. And you spent so much time learning how to program Java Applets that you feel ripped off.

How about, none of the above?

Flash hatred comes from several arenas.

First, Flash is a CPU hog. If you keep several tabs and such open, your CPU (and browser) starts to bog down. If you're in the middle of a build and want to browse a little bit, boom, you're hit with flash ads that peg your CPU at 100%.

Second, most web developers misuse flash. Just like people misused java. Which results in people getting annoyed at all the little flash widgets all sucking up little bits of CPU here and there just so they can have clicky animated rollover buttons.

Third, most flash-heavy websites work poorly (see second point). Either they work at a fixed resolution, which sucks on any display that doesn't match the developer's (including widescreen, HDTVs, non-standard laptop resolutions, high-res displays, etc), you end up with an unresizable squinty mess.

Fourth, most flash features don't work across platforms. YouTube only works on desktop (and laptop) PCs (and Macs). What about when I don't want to schlep around a laptop, and have my PSP? Oh, it supports flash, but not the one required to watch YouTube. Nevermind Linux, either. Now there's YouTube mobile, which basically is a specialized YouTube client for platforms that don't support flash video (i.e., most platforms). Surfing the net on cellphones/psps/non-computer devices is getting more popular these days. Flash locks out all these (just like javascript did befor).

Fifth, until very recently, flash video wasn't easily viewable. And still isn't viewable with transcoding to other platforms. While practically every portable video player around can handle one of DivX/XviD/h.264/vc-1, almost none support flash video directly. Sure it's changing, but still.

It appears that browsing the web requires a UMPC more and more, simply because you need to run a full OS and full browser with full flash support to just do anything on the web.

Flash is basically what Microsoft wanted to do with ActiveX - turn the web less into a platform, and into something that locks people into a specific platform.

Now, I admit, there are a few good animations/flash games out there. However, the sheer amount of flash crap greatly outweighs the good. Thank god for FlashBlock. Nevermind the flash ads, which make it impossible to surf the web with your speakers/headphones on. I don't think there's any other software technology out there that really makes one wish they could rip the sound card OUT of their computer.

Re:Who cares?

[jellomizer]

Yes but people would do that without flash... Just checkout Myspace. Click on a random profile there is some stupid music playing the background. Adds will stay flashy if you remember back in the 90's before flash was popular you just spend more time downloading Animated GIFs, that flashed rapidly with Flash at least the add makers make the adds that look nice and are a lot less distracting. Flash is not what created the problem stupid people created the problem all that flash did was make the problem a little better.

Re:Who cares?

[Xtravar]

Nevermind Linux, either. I use Flash just fine in Linux... perhaps your are mistaken.

Nevermind the flash ads, which make it impossible to surf the web with your speakers/headphones on. I don't think there's any other software technology out there that really makes one wish they could rip the sound card OUT of their computer. Yeah, one thing that always bugs me is that you can't right click on a Flash object and adjust/mute the volume. Flash has way too much control over my computer when it runs, and that really bothers me. If they would even just add some enhancements to the Flash player so that it would allow muting/stopping/etc, it would be that much more tolerable. However, they have to make it so uncontrollable because that's what content makers want - to shove things down our throats without us having a say in it.

Re:Who cares?

[apoc.famine]

That wasn't his point - I too use FlashBlock. The problem is that there is no way to know what's there until you start it. At which point, you often can't easily stop the flash if it turns out to be an ad, or something else you didn't want. There often is no way to pause it to go grab a drink. There often is no way to rewind it and start over.

It's easy to "choose what flash items you want turned on individually" - it's damn near impossible most of the time to actually have any control over the flash item once started.

I hate flash with a passion because of this reason. If they put a useful, standard video menu in it which you could bring up via a right- click, I'd hate it far less. In fact, at that point it would be semi-useful. As-is, it's another example of "this is how you will see it, take it or leave it". Most of us want at least some semblance of control over the media presented to us. I prefer my eyelids not pried opened and stapled to my head.

Re:Who cares?

[jellomizer]

Yea without Linux Hurd will be the dominate Open Source OS. The thing with technology, The best products rarely make it to #1 the worst products usually die out quickly. Leaving the middle of the road products gaining market share. Once a product gets popular it normally gets dumbed down so the rest of the population can use it. The point of my original post isn't stating that I am a Flash Fan boy. But for some sites it is the best tool for the job.

Re:Who cares?

[*weasel]

and I'm talking about the sites of interest probably just offering plain h.264 streams, now that they'll be maintaining an h.264 repository anyway.

either way, it'd be fairly straightforward to write an applet that ignores the flash and latches onto the h.264 stream. Unless adobe tries to obfuscate the data stream. Which I wouldn't put past them but it wouldn't make the problem that much harder.

Re:Who cares?

[jellomizer]

But those prices will prevent that from happening...

Sites that Use flash now usually are rich enough to use it. Ones that don't go with the more open platforms.... Normal HTML, AJAX. Adobe realizes that such technologies exist and are free for people to use, but Adobe is focused more on the professional market not the hobby market. A lot of people in the professional field will look at the the hobby market to see what they can do for cheaper. I would be more worried if Adobe Gave away Flash for Free as well the developer for more then the 30 day trial but for all developers to use, then after we are stuck with it then force us to pay for new versions... But right now their model is not based on that.

Re:Who cares?

[*weasel]

I don't like Flash because I don't like the idea of large chunks of the web being built on proprietary standards.

What flash did, that was good, is vector graphics and proper animation. That was stuff html didn't do well, when it even tried, but that does have a good place on the web. I just don't think we need to rely on a proprietary plug-in for it. That functionality should be encapsulated in an html extension, and any browser that cares to support the extension should be free to do so.

But what flash does, and will do, is increasingly large bits of platform crap. We do not need flash to stream video. We have it, because there was no good standard video codec back in the day, and video plug-ins were kind of left in the ghetto. Now that we have h.264 - that any number of players can play - we don't need flash.

And we don't need flash as a chubby client for asynchronous apps. We have ajax and that'll work well-enough to get us through the development of an open standard to do such apps in a better way.

Proprietary standards blow, because we're left to the whim of the company in question as to whether new platforms are viable.
New browsers, new operating systems, new devices - you'll need Adobe to see the ROI and see eye-to-eye with the new platform's goals to get their blessing. And that's a barrier to entry the Internet works far better without.

Or maybe you think the internet was better off when ActiveX and IE were assumed?
Because we're headed to a place where the IE/ActiveX years come back in the form of AIR.
(Why do you think Microsoft is so keen to replace it with Silverlight?)

I'd like to think we'd learned our lesson.
The masses might still bring it to pass. But that doesn't mean it's good technologically.

Re:Who cares?

[afidel]

Uh, power consumption is significant for media PC's, more heat means the fans have to spin faster = more noise. Also there are plenty of people who might be potential consumers of HD content that don't want to buy a new PC, as this article points out an Athlon 3000+ can barely handle 480p content, let alone 720p or 1080p using H.264 but has no problem with VC1@1080p.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

Point taken.

But now that they're using a standard media format, why use flash for HD content on media PCs?

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

H.264 encoding software is quite inexpensive. A simple flash player can now play the same video formats you'd be using with native players. So what Adobe has done is admitted they can't compete to lock down a video and audio format as well as an interactive media format. This is a loss for them, but if everyone gets behind it then it'll drive further the deployment of flash, and they can still have a net win.

Re:Who cares?

[adamofgreyskull]

How about hating it because an upgrade to the latest version, so I could watch a video, caused firefox on GNU/Linux to crash for me, whenever I landed on a page that had ANY flash on it whatsoever?

Re:Who cares?

[afidel]

My media PC has plugins for Yahoo videos and YouTube, I expect that both will get HD content over the next year or so. If they expose the raw H.264 streams that's fine but I HIGHLY doubt they will, so using the flash container will have to be good enough.

Re:Who cares?

[phase_9]

As a flash video designer I would be interested to know what functions you would like to see on the right-click menu?

Start, Pause, Rewind, Mute, Skip?

Re:Who cares?

[chrisl456]

Ehh, I can play 720p h.264 video just fine on my lowly Athlon 2600+. I did have to do a custom compile of MPlayer to get it to work properly, and the CPU isn't doing any audio decoding (I use digital out connected to my receiver, which decodes AC3 & DTS). But it works just fine. Now 1080p, there's just no way. ;)

It's running a pretty stock install of OpenSuse 10.2.

Re:Who cares?

[AusIV]

Lots of people seem to object on the grounds that it's not open source. Generally, I prefer to use open source alternatives where available, but Gnash isn't up to speed for playing flash videos.

My big question is, where is the open source competitor to Flash? There may be something I'm unaware of, but look at the different media formats. MP3 has Ogg Vorbis as a Free competitor, GIF has PNG, MPG has Theora, ODF covers the gamut for office formats, Mono is a free alternative to .Net, and the list goes on. While it's nice to have interpreters for the formats that are de facto standards, I see as much or more value in projects with similar goals that aren't exactly clones. Where is the open source attempt to replace flash?

Re:Who cares?

[BenoitRen]

It is fast to load and to play even on slow systems.

Are you kidding? It's quite slow on a PC slower than 1 Ghz. Especially for movies.

It's also badly designed. Seriously, it boasts animated content, yet relies on Windows' standard display driver, without using DirectX.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Now that Flash can play high-quality HD video (and extremely-small-file-size SD video), and preparing with one codec can prepare for everything from phones to HD televisions, what appeal does Microsoft's codecs and containers have?

VC-1 has far lower license fees than h.264. Don't underestimate price.

Surely no one can suggest that Windows Media Player has better deployment than Adobe's Flash?

Yes, I can. Windows Media Player penetration is just under 90%, but basically ALL of those support WMV9 (aka. WMV3/VC-1) thanks to WMP's ability to download needed codecs. Flash may have just under 95% penetration, but NONE of those supports h.264 yet.

It's going to take a long time for everyone to update their Flash player, and I'm willing to bet at least 5%+ won't upgrade their Flash player to 9+ (essentially) ever, giving WMV9 the advantage.

Maybe WMV9's advantage could be overcome by the combination of Flash plus other h.264 players (like Quicktime, open source players, etc.) but with the absolutely idiotic way FLVs have to be played, by the use of an embedded SWF video controller/player app, FLV (intentionally or not) locks out all other players, unless web devs everywhere suddenly wise-up and provide two different links for every video.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

Every website that wanted to do something a little more advanced then showing a couple of animated gifs, usually had or made their own plug in that worked only for Windows, or sometimes in a rare occurrence there was a plug in that would work on different OS's.

In the case of video, at least the formats are simple, and the file directly embedded, so there are plenty of 3rd party (open source) browser plug-ins for handling videos.

With FLV, however, videos are not directly embedded, but instead handled indirectly. A SWF video player program/applet is embedded, and only it knows where to find the actual FLV. So it's practically impossible to write your own plug-in that will handle FLVs embedded in web pages, even though several players can play them, if you can decipher the real URL for the it.

I also agree I hate it for the lack of control, bugginess of the free/proprietary/binary plugin, etc., as others have said.

Re:Who cares?

[cibyr]

Open in New Tab, Mute, and Go Away are much needed. A "don't open in new window" option would be good too.

I guess Play/Pause, Rewind and Skip would be handy too, but my main annoyances are with flash navigation breaking my browser's usual UI (ie, I can't middle click on a link to open a new tab). Also, if anything in your flash requires scrolling, it had better work with my scroll wheel.

Re:Who cares?

[apoc.famine]

Those are all things which would be damn nice to have. If you put those sorts of things in your flash videos, kudos to you! Unfortunately, flash by default doesn't have them, thus the source of my irritation with it. As an example, YouTube doesn't do it all that badly. It has most of the above. Heck, while it doesn't have a full stop, pause is pretty damn near good enough.

While you might be a decent enough designer to include such useful tools, the unfortunate fact is that there are many folks who don't. What I really want, more than anything, is to be able to right click on ANY flash and get that sort of menu, irregardless of what the designer did or did not bother to include. That would be useful, and would make me hate flash far less.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

VC-1 has far lower license fees than h.264. Don't underestimate price.

Whoah whoah whoa. H.264 encoders and decoders are covered in regions that support software patents, but that's the encoder. Media which is distributed doesn't incur a licensing fee, since it is simply media that adheres to an open and public standard.

As far as I can tell, you don't need to pay licensing fees to distribute media encoded to the spec. If your products do not include the patented technology (namely the encoder and decoder) then you're good. If you have concrete information to the contrary, please link it and correct me.

This might slightly increase the cost of making Flash products, since they ship a decoder. It also may not, the MPEG LA is really weird about this. I simply don't know. Adobe could simply not include an H.264 encoder as part of their core product, instead shipping it separately.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

As far as I can tell, you don't need to pay licensing fees to distribute media encoded to the spec.

You are very, very wrong.

If you have concrete information to the contrary, please link it and correct me.

Trivially easy to find:

http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf

Page 3 and 4 cover per-user and/or per-channel fees for selling/broadcasting video encoded with AVC/h.264.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

From your document:

In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010),
and after the first term the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.

In other words, the internet usecase is free for several more years, and is renewable on the original terms.

Re:Who cares?

[evilviper]

the internet usecase is free for several more years,

Yes, that's true. But that wasn't what you asked.

and is renewable on the original terms.

No, I think you misread that sentence. It only says the fees for (non-fee-based) internet distribution won't be any higher than for (non-fee-based) TV broadcasting.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

Anyways, thank you for the link.

If H.264 on the internet becomes very ubiquitous, I wonder if they could actually enforce their royalties as listed. The Licensing fees listed for broadcast TV seem ludicrously high for internet distribution. I suppose the same thing that's happening with internet radio could happen again, onloy this time pertaining to the underlying technology.

Re:Who cares?

[stunt_penguin]

Are you kidding? It's quite slow on a PC slower than 1 Ghz. Especially for movies.

What the hell are you using? The OLPC computer? Get a PC built sometime this decade and get back to us.

Re:Who cares?

[BenoitRen]

Just to accomodate a CPU-hogging plug-in, while all the rest works fine? No thanks, that would be quite stupid.

You must be some Microsoft puppet in favor of the perpetual upgrade cycle.

What about theora (and dirac)?

[Anonymous Coward]

youtube-dl and ffmpeg make the flv container useful, even for those without flash. For those with flash, we'd know they had the theora codec available - so flv/theora becomes a viable delivery method and flash becomes the enabling tech.

What have Adobe got to lose?

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[Goaway]

h.264 is a far better codec than Theora will ever be, and it's standardized instead of being a hobbyist toy project.

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Define 'better', 'standardized' and 'hobbyist'!

• Is having to pay royalties to broadcast or transmit a format 'better'?
  
• Is having to pay patent royalties to encode/decode 'better'?
  
• The theora spec is the standard, a standards body would have no choice but to rubber stamp it.
  
• Theora is far from a 'hobbyist' project
  
• In any case, Linux was a 'hobbyist' project while Windows was long considered a desktop toy.
  

Like it or not, Theora is set to become the lowest common denominator for web video. The web was intended to be open and inclusive for everyone, as such proprietary codecs are not always appropriate.

In short: you're a dick!

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Define "define"! Define "and"! As though asking silly questions like that does anything to diminish the points he made.

Nobody uses Theora. Nobody! If a format is not supported out of the box on Windows, it has no chance of ever becoming relevant. And Theora, like it or not, will never be supported out of the box on Windows.

Flash adopting H.264 is significant because it makes H.264 supported out of the box on Windows, since Flash is installed on every Windows box. That means H.264 is now the video format for the web, game over. YouTube has already adopted H.264 for its third-party contracts like the iPhone. Now that Flash is adding support for H.264, the web version of YouTube will soon follow. And H.264 is already required for bot HD-DVD and BluRay, so it will win no matter which HD format wins the war.

DivX and Xvid in hacked up AVI wrappers may hang on for a little while longer when it comes to non-legit undeground Torrented content, but as far as legit content is concerned, that's it. H.264 is the future.

And I wouldn't concern myself about royalties or patents. There are plenty of open source projects that support H.264, and so far none of them have gotten hassled. It's doubtful they ever will, because there is no money involved. Besides, Theora offers no protection from that sort of thing, because it is probably stepping on someone's patents somewhere. If a company wanted to go after open source video, Theora vs. H.264 wouldn't make any difference. They would find something to sue over either way. So Theora offers no practical real-world advantage in that area.

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and in case you missed it, this quote from the Adobe guy's blog reinforces what I was saying about OSS, under his "scenarios" section at the end:

You want to get best the possible quality out of your video and do not want to be tied to a particular encoding solution. You also like open source software to do all of the work you need to do to encode video. A combination of libfaad, x264 and MP4Box which are all licensed under the GPL will do exactly that...

There you go.

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[evilviper]

Is having to pay royalties to broadcast or transmit a format 'better'?

If the cost of the royalties allow you to save far more in bandwidth costs... Yes, that would be a hell of a lot better.

Theora is far from a 'hobbyist' project

Quite the opposite. Not only is it a hobbyist project, but it's a pretty sad one. Something like 4 years behind schedule in even releasing a BETA version of the software, let alone a final 1.0 version. Theora has stagnated to the point of ridiculousness.

VP3 was just barely competitive when it was released, and now, many years, later stands no chance against modern codecs like h.264 and VC-1.

The web was intended to be open and inclusive for everyone, as such proprietary codecs are not always appropriate.

h.264 is an open and decidedly non-proprietary codec.

In short: you're a dick!

And you're a fool.

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like 4 years behind schedule in even releasing a BETA version of the software, let alone a final 1.0 version.

FYI coincidentally Theora 1.0 will be released soon, see: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2007-August /001532.html

h.264 is an open and decidedly non-proprietary codec.

But that doesn't mean, that you have to pay patent licensing royalties in those countries, where software patents are applicable. Theora is completely free.

And you're a fool.

So Opera corp. or Mozilla Foundation are fools too, when they are working on Theora support in the next versions of their browsers?

Re:What about theora (and dirac)?

[evilviper]

So Opera corp. or Mozilla Foundation are fools too, when they are working on Theora support in the next versions of their browsers?

Yes. Video codecs don't belong in browsers. That's what plugins are for.

Ask them why they're supporting Theora now, and not VP3.2 when it was released 6+ years ago, or MPEG-1 way back when the patents expired. And how about audio like Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC, speex, etc. Will they integrate those as well, since they're patent-free?

Best of both world

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I hate 99% of flash content out there, I find Firefox + Flashblock works nicely. I can block all flash, yet allow it to show for Youtube and Home Star Runner, which isprecisely what I've done. If I need to access some flash based element of a page I can, otherwise it can stay off and not bother me.

YouTube

[Coppit]

So maybe finally YouTube won't look like crap. Fullscreen is a joke.

Yes, but support for other stuff?

[drspliff]

I've been waiting for ages for them to make the realtime voice codec available to anybody for development without reverse engineering their software or paying extortionate fees to a third party company who seems really reluctant to license the codec.

And in the first place, why couldn't they have used an open standard that every already supports, if they had've done you'd see hundereds of Flash based VoIP applications out there already.

I don't mind Macromedia Flash, but it's just not open enough for my liking :\

64bit Linux Version

[ihop0]

I'd be happier if they'd get up off their asses and finish a 64bit linux flash player.

... and they are dropping support

[Anonymous Coward]

At the same time as doing this they are dropping for older codecs in the new file format that supports H.264 and AAC.

All this this move is the industry moving to freshly patented formats before the patent protection drops on the old stuff. They even admit themselves that the new support isn't intended to offer improved quality, and because of the limited profile it won't.

We should fully expect to see the old FLV format discontinued in a revision or two.

Nothing more to see here. Move along.

Download link available?

[aclidiere]

Has anyone found the download link?

The version of Flash from this page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9 seems to be a beta version from June 11.

Re:Download link available?

[grondu]

The press release at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressrel eases/200708/082107FlashPlayer.html says it will be available later today at http://labs.adobe.com/

Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[KlomDark]

I'm tired of whining about this one, just ready to write off Flash as some kind of archaic technology, but maybe someone from there will ready this.

WHEN ARE WE GETTING A 64-BIT FLASH PLAYER FOR WINDOWS???? XP x64, or Vista x64. Hell, even a crappy beta would be fine.

It's been four @#$%ing YEARS since Windows XP x64 came out. It's time to quit making excuses. It's time to shit or get off the pot. Maybe it's time for Silverlight instead?

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need a 64-bit version on Windows XP x64? The 32-bit version works just fine, unless you're running a Flash program that needs to address more than 4 gigs of memory.

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[extrasupermario]

You are still using windows? OMG when are you going to get up to speed and run Linux

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[SuseLover]

Why on earth are folks running 64-bit desktops? It's unnecessarily silly. 64-bitness gains you nothing for desktop use, it is meant for systems (servers) that need more RAM than can be addressed via 32-bits. Performance is even slower with 64-bit unless all your apps are native 64-bit ones and I can't think of a single end-user app that is 64-bit.

If you only run games, browsers, email clients, photo editors, etc. why do so many people think they need 64-bit OS's? Especially when there is so little support for non-server 64bit software.

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[WhiteWolf666]

On my OS of choice (Linux), I get a 30-40% speed boost in video/audio encoding in 64-bit, using 64-bit applications.

Many of these applications that I use are also available for that _other_ OS, Win32. I'm guessing you see a substantial speedup there, too.

If you are using Linux, 64-bit is a non-issue; everything works, and all your 32-bit software works, too, with very minor issues (like being unable to use 32-bit windows drivers in ndiswrapper (64-bit work fine). All the software which is compiled for 64-bit and is math intensive tends to be a lot faster.

If you are using Mac OS X, 64-bit is a non-issue. Most Mac software comes in quad-universal binaries, with 32/64-bit code paths, and PPC/Intel code paths. iTunes, iMovie, and the Apple Studio stuff all work a good 30% faster on Core 2 processors than on Core processors. All 32-bit software works flawlessly, too.

I don't have any experience with Windows 64-bit, but I don't understand why it should be such a problem; Microsoft clearly needs to play some catch up here.

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[WhiteWolf666]

If you don't believe me, there are some benchmarks here:
http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/ 24/1747228

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[illumin8]

WHEN ARE WE GETTING A 64-BIT FLASH PLAYER FOR WINDOWS???? XP x64, or Vista x64. Hell, even a crappy beta would be fine.

Maybe when 64-bit Windows gets enough market share to have even a fraction as many desktops as there are Linux users out there, you _might_ get a plugin. Seriously, would you demand the same thing for your OpenBSD box? Because it sounds to me like you're the 0.001% of the userbase out there whining "why doesn't Adobe provide X software for my GNU/hurd system?"

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say most of your points are valid, but... quad-universal binaries? You're obviously not familiar with OS X, but as you say you're mainly a Linux person, that's forgivable. :-)

Intel Macs won't have a 64-bit operating system until Leopard comes out in a month or so. So everything on an Intel Mac is running in 32-bit, regardless of whether you're using a Core or Core 2. Incidentally, the Core 2 is also a faster processor than the original Core, at equivalent clock speeds. It's also well-known that Core 2 64-bit performance is inferior to AMD's offerings (though the 32-bit performance is every bit as superior as reported), which probably implies 64-bitness in Leopard probably won't improve performance much.

And, in any case, OS X has never come with 64-bit GUIs, even back in the G5 days. A 64-bit Cocoa API is also new with Leopard.

So no, "quad-universal binaries" don't exist (and would be a QA nightmare anyway). It's just that 32-bit apps run just fine on x86-64. x86-64 was basically designed for that exact purpose.

I'm just glad AMD started the 64-bit transition when they did, as we're finally beginning to run up against the limitations of 32-bit addressing. Who knows where we'd be if we were still stuck with IA64, or Intel's assertion that 32-bit CPUs were still good enough. A desktop application needing 4+ GB of memory (games in particular, but also a lot of content creation applications, which are also becoming more popular as more people have faster computers) isn't quite as ridiculous as it used to be.

And this, incidentally, is the real reason why 64-bit computing is going to become important. Not because most applications need it (they don't--this has even been true on the server side for quite some time; face it, cat doesn't need 64-bit address spaces, even for LFS), but because when you need it, you really need it. The 64-bit desktop has become stable enough that I'm comfortable running it right now, even if most of my apps are still 32-bit. Because reinstalling an OS isn't something you should have to do more than once every five years.

And for developers (like myself), a 64-bit desktop is a godsend.

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is apparent that you have never actually used XP x64. It IS significantly smoother running than XP x86 and the 64-bit applications that I use are significantly faster and more responsive than their 32-bit counterparts.

As for 32-bit applications, WOW64 provides the ability to run them all with absolutely no decrease in performance. Everything from the simplest text editors to the most complex games run without issue.

The next time you want to spout off, at least do it for something that you actually know about.

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[mabinogi]

Have a look at This article.
With 4GB machines being more and more common (my laptop has 4GB - and it's not a workstation class one either, just a medium high end consumer one), the need for a 64 bit addressing is no longer something in the distant future.
32 bit addressing - and particularly the 2G userland / kernel split in Windows is already causing problems for games right now.

Sun and Adobe are both dragging the chain on 64 bit browser plugins. Although, at least Adobe say they're working on it, but Sun's reluctance makes little to no sense, they've had a 64 bit JVM and JDK for years, for both Windows and Linux. If they can manage to port the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of lines of code in the JVM to AMD64, why can't they manage the plugin? Surely that's only a handful of lines? A couple of thousand at most?

But there should be a native port!

[antdude]

Sure, we can use this workaround, but 64-bit is common now. We should have native ports.

Re:But there should be a native port!

[NightFears]

As I pointed out in another post, there's a version of gnash for Linux on amd64 that's already available (but still way too buggy).

Re:But there should be a native port!

[antdude]

True, but I prefer a stable 64-bit Linux port from Adobe. I know it's closed source, it will it is fine to me like two popular video drivers.

The mobile world

[neglige]

Although the mentioned release is for the PC, I'd say this has a major impact on another realm: mobile devices. I'd even go so far to speculate that this is one of the main reasons for implementing H.264 (the blog just says "our customers want it").

In most mobile standards (e.g. 3GPP, DVB), and also for IPTV, H.264 is the required video codec. So unless an environment can support it, one way or the other, it is not relevant for implementing services with it. This was a drawback of Flash in the past, I reckon it's now back in the race. With H.264 and AAC capabilities, it is possible to implement mobile (video/TV) clients. And: as Flash is supported on many different devices, you can use it to offer a service that is available on PCs, mobile devices (phone, PDA), set top boxes, ... (a.k.a. converged services)

Took Adobe a while to realize that without H.264 the road will be rocky, no matter how good their supported video codec is, just because it's not in the standards.

Re:The mobile world

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the mentioned release is for the PC

Do you mean a PC running OS X, a PC running Linux, a PC running Solaris, or a PC running Windows ? If you mean Windows, say Windows. PC is too generic anymore.

Re:The mobile world

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean a PC running OS X, a PC running Linux, a PC running Solaris, or a PC running Windows ? If you mean Windows, say Windows. PC is too generic anymore.

Honestly, if the PC is not running Windows, then the user probably hates Flash anyway. Just look at the other replies to this story.

Devices are already hosed anyway.

[hummassa]

At least the PSP browser only plays flash 6 and has too little memory; so, no YouTube.

Hardware Acceleration

[tji]

The article claims that that Adobe said it will use hardware acceleration for H.264.. Are there any more details on this?

Is it Windows-only? Probably.
Does it use DirectX video acceleration APIs (do they handle H.264) or maybe OpenGL shader (GLSL) offload? If it's the second, it would have a chance for Mac and Linux support too.

Re:Hardware Acceleration

[moosesocks]

You're right. Flash under OS X is (presently) absolutely miserable.

It's not unusual for a single flash applet to suck up 100% CPU on even a recent Mac while sitting idle.

Re:Hardware Acceleration

[tji]

Yes, I see the same thing. That's one reason I switched to Camino as my WWW browser, it has flash-block functionality built-in. I have complained to a Safari developer about this. His response was basically "tell Adobe.. we can't do anything about it".

Hardware accel would help for H.264 video. But, I think Mac FlashPlayer just needs to be optimized, because I get that same high cpu load when running seemingly simple flash apps. It's really annoying when some flash animated advertisement is running on a www page, and my system fans kick into high gear to cool it. That sucks for such a lame purpose.

Re:Hardware Acceleration

[tji]

Following up on my own post... Based on various descriptions I have read on adobe.com, I think the hardware acceleration is limited to hardware overlay scaling. So, when you display a window larger than the actual video size, or full-screen, the application uses a video overlay to draw the video on. That overlay can be scaled up/down, and the GPU takes care of the scaling of the content, rather than relying on the software to scale & re-draw the frame at the desired size.

This is nice. But, it is a small fraction of the CPU overhead required for H.264 decoding. I think we're still a ways away from widespread GPU acceleration (unfortunately.. many apps could really use this).

DHTML audio capability?

[tepples]

Little of what Flash is used for even requires Flash and could be done with modern OS-agnostic DHTML.

In which user agents can DHTML play a sound whenever the user does something, such as playing a "rustling leaves" sound when the user moves his character next to a tree and presses the use key?

In which user agents can DHTML or SMIL synchronize an SVG animation with an audio object?

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[sremick]

I didn't say DHTML could do everything Flash did. I said "Little of what Flash is used for even requires Flash...". Read my comment again.

Most sites using Flash are using it for such mundane purposes as doing mouseover/expanding menus and other simple interface mechanics that not only can be done with DHTML, but can be done simpler with broader browser compatibility and faster page-load times (less bytes on the wire). In fact, a site's basic interface and navigation should never require a plugin. Plugins should only offer added content.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[Yvan256]

In which user agents can DHTML play a sound whenever the user does something, such as playing a "rustling leaves" sound when the user moves his character next to a tree and presses the use key?

Since you asked, here's the list:
- Safari 9
- Firefox 10
- Opera 8
- Internet Explorer 53

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[Negadecimal]

but can be done simpler with broader browser compatibility and faster page-load times (less bytes on the wire)

I'll agree with you on the first point, but for simple interface stuff, I've actually produced many Flash solutions that required a less bytes than the canned "multibrowserconfigurableexpandingmenus.js" stuff people use.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[tepples]

In which user agents can DHTML play a sound whenever the user does something? Since you asked, here's the list:
[...]
- Opera 8 Of all the web browser versions you listed, only Opera 8 actually exists. Your response motivated me to try a few different keywords, and I found two ways to play sound from script: one that works in everything but Opera and one based on HTML 5 Audio that works in Opera, which I guess is what you're using some irony to talk about. But I don't yet know how practical writing, say, a platform game in DHTML is.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[tepples]

for simple interface stuff, I've actually produced many Flash solutions that required a less bytes than the canned "multibrowserconfigurableexpandingmenus.js" stuff people use. Could it have anything to do with applying built-in compression to compiled ActionScript logic, vs. not installing gzip on the server? And which method uses fewer bytes of RAM, which is important especially for browsing on handheld devices and game consoles?

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[toriver]

They did a DHTML version of Lemmings, so why not?

(I am lazy, google it.)

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[mattyrobinson69]

function playSound(url){
    if (navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer") {
        var snd = document.createElement("bgsound");
        document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChi ld(snd);
        snd.src=url
    } else {
        var snd = document.createElement("object");
        snd.width="0px";
        snd.height="0px";
        snd.type = "audio/x-wav";
        snd.data = url;

        var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
        body.appendChild(snd);
    }
}

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[tepples]

Thanks for this code. I got it to work in at least IE and Firefox.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[evilviper]

I've actually produced many Flash solutions that required a less bytes than the canned "multibrowserconfigurableexpandingmenus.js" stuff people use.

Flash files are compressed when they are created, while the javascript version will be dynamically compressed (mod_gzip) before it's sent over the wire. So I'm willing to bet the js version is actually significantly smaller.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[mattyrobinson69]

Works in opera too. We use it as part of an xmlrpc based notification system. I'm not sure how laggy it is, but we dont notice any lag (although the files we play will all be cached on our development machines)

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[doublec]

In browsers that support the HTML 5 audio element this will be possible.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[tepples]

In browsers that support the HTML 5 audio element this will be possible. Does or will Internet Channel, the only web browser for the Wii console, support the HTML 5 audio element? Or do games for Internet Channel need to be coded in SWF?

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[doublec]

Reading the specs on Internet Channel it appears that it currently does not support it. Opera were the first to propose and implement support for so hopefully that and its companion will be included one day.

Re:DHTML audio capability?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read your comment again. It says: "Little of what Flash is used for... could be done with modern OS-agnostic DHTML." Sadly you're right there.

Wii

[mzs]

And never for the Nintendo Wii, which is a drag, it is used almost daily to view youtube at my house.

Re:Wii

[CastrTroy]

Not only youtube, but with H.264, it would be possible to create a nice little browser based media server. I currently am using a flash solution, which technically works fine, but the video quality is pretty terrible.

Full Screen/Theatre Mode

[cycle003]

Maybe it's just the particular system I'm running for my media pc (WinXP with an old Radeon 9600Pro video card), but I cannot get flash video to run full screen on my TV. Essentially all other video has no problem fitting nicely on my TV by simply specifying theater mode in ATI Catalyst for the TV, which is set as a secondary monitor. Does anyone else have this problem or know of a work-around?

Re:Full Screen/Theatre Mode

[Anonymous Coward]

The video card depends on the video display using "overlay" technology in order to be able to identify the video and make the desired adjustments (color, position, display, etc). With certain video types, even the decompression can be offloaded from the CPU (MPEG and MPEG2 traditionally, and now the MPEG4 variants and WMV with modern display boards).

Flash video, in its current form, is rendered almost entirely by the CPU. This also explains why old CPUs that are just barely able to play a DVD without losing frames can't play Youtube videos worth a damn, despite the much lower video quality. It's like playing Quake IV using a software reference renderer.

Will it have a STOP button?

[^_^x]

I use Opera so I can block content selectively. The typical IE + Flash user experience though is to load a site, then watch your CPU slam to a crawl as it tries to play 6 streaming video banner ads at once while some massive, page-blocking shape pops up with another instance of Flash.

Flash really sucks. It was bad a little while after its introduction, but has only become more of a pain unless you have a brand new PC and are viewing a site kind enough to only embed one instance of Shockwave / Flash. What it needs is an off switch since on a lot of movies you can't even right-click and unselect "play" anymore.

Re:Will it have a STOP button?

[toddhisattva]

Flash really sucks.

Flash sucks and so do the people who use it!

Re:Will it have a STOP button?

[^_^x]

Yes - I wish it would fade into obscurity. I have to admit I keep a copy though, because without it, thousands (millions?) of websites basically just say "Sorry, you don't have Flash installed. Nothing here for you!"

Where to for YouTube alternatives?

[PhillC]

I run a moderate sized niche video website that focuses on motorcycle related content - http://www.kapitalmototv.com

Prior to launch we discussed long and hard what video codec and format to go with. In the end we decided on H.264 encoded QuickTime files with AAC audio. Primarily we made this choice so that we were offering higher quality video than was available on the likes of YouTube, while understandably taking a hit on the QuickTime install base when compare to Flash.

Now, this recent Flash development could be a good thing in the sense that all our existing H.264 files can now be used in the new Flash Player, which would significantly increase the install base for users who can view our content.

However, if YouTube starts offering H.264 files, and thus increasing quality, where to now to provide a compelling differentiator for Kapital Moto TV?

Of course we still have the niche content, editorial control over the content and an existing userbase, but for all intents and purposes YouTube has caught up when it comes to viewing experience.

Do we simply start offering larger resolution files? 640x480 for example. What are the other differentiating options?

Has to do with the deal they made with Apple

[ChrisA90278]

H.264 was added at Apple's request. they are currently streaming h264 to iPhone ad Apple TV users, Both of these devices use H264. I don't know the agreement between Apple and utube but I'd bet Apple is helping to pay for the re-encoding of content to h264. Now it looks like they decided to take advantage of the re-encoding of their library and add h264 to Flash. It's good to move to an open standard like H264

block this!

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm sure we've all noticed the way in which the ignorant flash bashers round here have gone a bit quiet lately - or maybe they're just getting old and dying out?

this kind of news will serve as a nice cup of "shut the f**k up" to the remaining few c***s that just don't get it.

my 2 cents

[Antilles]

disclaimer: I work on a startup project that is based in flash video

this is definitely a game changer, although it doesnt seem like it is getting picked up by the major blog/media sites. It simply comes down to how this will affect the economics of producing good web video and monetizing it. in a nutshell, on2 basically gave away the decoder to adobe for the flash player but kept major control over how the encoding tools could be used. They essentially jacked up the fees on encoding to make their money thinking they had a free ride on this one, and with the rise of web video / youtube, their stock price soared in the past 2 years. The big advantage they have over the other guys in flash video, ie, sorenson, was quality --- notice youtube's quality is not that great, even though the file sizes are comparable? It's cause they use ffmpeg on the backend to transcode video to the flv format. The obvious question now, IS --- why doesnt youtube use on2's superior vp6 codec and get the pretty video? Becuase ffmpeg cant legally support it (I dont think, but ive seen hacks) and to license from on2 is just not economically feasible from a business standpoint (disclaimer: I do not know anyone at youtube, but we have ran into similar problems with our product, and I'm extrapolating their situtation with the logical conclusions.).

I sorta figured someone out there was gonna get ticked that there was a gatekeeper sitting on a major web tech, and I knew something had to give. I think the first clue should have been the fact that youtube was transcoding everything over to h246, but I figured that was initially just for my personal enjoyment on my iphone. <grin/> Apparently they knew a few people over at adobe. The second clue, and you cant keep things like new major codecs in the worlds most dominant web video platform a secret --- was that on2's stock price has dropped from around $3.69 three months ago to $1.48 as of this morning.

so. where does that leave web video? Well, as soon as I saw the news last night, I began checking the legal issues with transcoding to h264 for our project (does ffmpeg support it, cost, etc) and apparently, its a very accessibly standard. It's going to work with the existing netstream and video objects (whether you like them or not! whats up with the stuttering issues, adobe?) so our video editor should be able to mix sorenson, vp6, and h264 video content all in the same project (in real time, with effects! sorry, quick plug) which makes me very happy.

As far as the legal constraints or fees, I dont think their are any (please correct me here if im wrong, i do need to know myself). ffmpeg supports it out of the box ( apparently you can make standard h264 video files, or you can make a flv using the h264 codec, although the new file format the adobe guys are workign with seems to be superior.). For raw source code, Video Lan has an encoder: http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?

Re:my 2 cents

[RulerOf]

I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?

OMG. It's a huge conspiracy between Apple, Google, Adobe, AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 to get everyone to shell out more cash! Bigger/Higher quality videos. More bandwidth. Happier consumers. Larger bills. Richer companies! (Also: ???? Profit!!)

In all seriousness, it would be amazing to see something like this actually become the driving force for REAL broadband in the US.

Re:my 2 cents

[evilviper]

Your comments are extremely ignorant, and just plain incorrect...

The obvious question now, IS --- why doesnt youtube use on2's superior vp6 codec and get the pretty video? Becuase ffmpeg cant legally support it (I dont think, but ive seen hacks) and to license from on2 is just not economically feasible from a business standpoint

There are NO legal issues stopping ffmpeg from including VP6 support. ffmpeg includes all other manner of patented and copyrighted codecs, that had to be reverse engineered. If anyone was willing to put the effort into reverse engineering VP6, ffmpeg would include it.

Since no-one has been interested enough to do so, using the binary codec is the only option, but ffmpeg doesn't support loading of (Win32 DLLs) binary codecs. With mencoder however, you can quite easily encode VP6 FLVs.

As far as the legal constraints or fees, I dont think their are any (please correct me here if im wrong,

You are COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, and UTTERLY WRONG.

H.264 patent-license fees are in fact quite high. Lower license fees are almost certainly the main reason they went with VP6 in the first place, rather than jumping on the h.264 bandwagon in the Flash7 days.

ffmpeg supports it out of the box ( apparently you can make standard h264 video files, or you can make a flv using the h264 codec, although the new file format the adobe guys are workign with seems to be superior.)

ffmpeg's included h264 codec is quite simple/primitive. You really should use x264 instead.

For raw source code, Video Lan has an encoder: http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

x264 is only hosted on videolan's servers. It's widely available, in many forms. Directshow DLLs for encoding/decoding under Windows have been around for years, and Mencoder has supported encoding with x264 from the very beginning (mainly because a couple MPlayer developer were heavily involved in writing it from the start).

I'm not sure what you're suggesting

[Anonymous Coward]

You think most C programs people see are viruses?

Well, I guess that might be true, depending on your point of view -- C itself is a virus.

Is this where I say "Eclipse is almost as nice as my Symbolics machine", or where I say "the internet is almost as nice as when it had no ads"?

(I had started a much better comment but Firefox crashed.)

Will they release the SDK in a timely manner?

[J-1000]

From what I here, Flash support in alternative devices (e.g. Nintendo Wii) is hindered by the fact that you can't get a Flash 8 SDK. I'm assuming then that YouTube currently requires only Flash 7, which implies that improved video quality (requiring a new Flash version) will break compatibility.

What the... HEAR, HEAR!!!!!!

[J-1000]

An edit button would be nice right about now.

Don't forget about container formats

[tknd]

H.264 is great but it does nothing to address the container format like AVI, MP4, MKV. I honestly prefer MKV as it is an open spec and has a lot of nice features. AVI has been dragged along with windows and MP4 while ok, doesn't do some things well like subtitles. You can essentially dump H.264 streams into any of the three container formats (AVI is a little bit of an issue but it can be done), but because there's no standard, you end up installing all of the splitters for each of the containers. That is a pain in the ass.

They need to come up with a standard container, or a container like MKV needs to gain massive popularity. It's getting pretty annoying having to install three different components (player, codec, and splitter) to play a file. Mplayer has everything bundled but I think it could use more interface work.

Re:Don't forget about container formats

[evilviper]

H.264 is great but it does nothing to address the container format like AVI, MP4, MKV.

Except that you're completely wrong...

MP4 is THE container for h.264 video. You CAN use AVI and MKV but you'll never find h.264 in AVI/MKV, unless you make it yourself, or are getting files from some amateur release group idiot.

They need to come up with a standard container,

Which is exactly what they did, many years ago, creating the MP4 format.

Re:Don't forget about container formats

[Anonymous Coward]

MP4 is the standard container format for H.264 video and AAC audio. And it does subtitles extremely well - it's just the software that hasn't really caught up yet.

The Flash guy says they'll be supporting the Timed Text subtitles, so hopefully that will further their adoption.

Inconsistent information about the release date..

[aclidiere]

Thanks for the link.

The article said "the new Flash Player will be available later today" and the article is dated August 20. So I assumed the new player would be available this morning, August 21.

Apparently, the press release mentions "later today" as well, but is dated August 21.
I guess I'll have to be patient.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes we believe you. Though it depends on if the program in question has been written to take advantage of 64bit. For example, encoding with LAME in 64bit Linux gives no speed improvements, and is perhaps a notch slower on 64bit than 32bit (due to no 64bit nasm). But I believe LAME 4 is being rewritten to be 64bit friendly.

NOBODY cares about proprietary or not.

[Qbertino]

On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.

The truth is: Proprietary or not isn't the question or even a big problem. It never was, even during and after the browser wars. Nobody gives a shit about any monopoly as long as the people holding it don't screw and mess around with everybody else. Imagine MS delivering a rock solid 100% css2 cross-plattform IE 5.0 for Windows, OS X and Linux back in 2001. They'd've owned the web and people would have loved them for it. MS kept screwing around *and* abusing their monopoly and got their payback for it. Firefox at 20%+ and rising. There you go.

Flash is the prime Rich Client VM on the web for a very simple reason:
It is to date by far the very best and it tries very hard not to suck.
The Flash team is so ultra conservative about security it needs MS Active X conector enforcement to make it unsafe on Windows. The plugin is even easier to install than most browsers or any other type of programm. The closest potential competitor - Java - is lagging lightyears behind in what was initially intended to be Javas key market. Even their latest semi-JMF-rebrand'n'recycle named JavaFX is way to cumbersome to use to ever gain foothold unless Sun finally get's their shit together and builds a Rich Media Client kit that doesn't suck.

Ever since ActionScript 2 Flash has been the most widespread turing complete plattform out there and just because many people can't handle it doesn't mean its evil. If Adobe would ever start to f*ck around to much after gaining a factual monopoly (which they sort of have allready) there'd be OSS alternatives almost instantly. Remember when IE owned the web? MS started screwing with the Linux, OSS and Webdev community and - Bingo! - along came Mozilla with rock-solid CSS. And suddenly nobody cared that it was a performance hog. IE had gotten so bad that Mozilla was the best. And all of a sudden we could do halfway relyable Layout without needing Flash or relying on an IE as client. Likewise with print: Adobe can own print for all eternity - as soon as they start screwing around (the still very good) Corel Draw would get a new chance in an instant.

It sure isn't very nice that there is no viable open-source, truely cross-plattform rich client that is up to what Flash can do. But frankly, people - even the OSS advocates - don't care wether software is OSS or not. If a company treats it's users and developers fair, nobody gives a hoot about that. OSS is rarely a value in itself for things other than preventing lock-in on mission critical components. Or does it really bug the p*ss out of you that your Nvidia Linux GFX drivers and the Linux binary of Unreal Tournament 3 are both non-OSS? Didn't think so.

Flash is the king of the rich client hill. And if Adobe improves on their delivery of x-plattform compatibility, performance and featureset, and doesn't water down their stuff with to much Windows-only+OS-X-late+Linux-next-millenium Apollo, Air or whatnot stunts, then Flash will continue to stay in that position. And for good reasons too. I'm also a professional Flash developer since 2001 and am allways on my toes. As soon as Adobe starts messing with me I'm outa here and telling my clients that sound + neat litte anims gotta stand back behind todays usual Ajax fare until Gnash gains some foothold (and a project site that doesn't look retarded). But as long as they play nice, deliver video that is even easyer to deploy and deliver than the entire Real pipeline I don't care very much if they own RIA, web-video and the only feasable solution for everything other that classic websites.

That's my experience from since the dot-boom anyway.

H.264 licensing fees

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a news release with the licensing fee information, although I suppose there's a more official document somewhere: http://www.mpegla.com/news/n_03-11-17_avc.html

You didn't really think you were going to escape the content-based licensing fees they introduced with MPEG-4, did you? The good news (for you), however, is that the fee structure is fairly reasonable for your type of application. Depending on how you classify yourself, and where your revenue will come from, you'd probably end up paying nothing.

Of course, you're going to want to consult with your legal staff. But that's a starting point.

(Incidentally, sheesh. Reading all that typewriter type was mind-numbing.)

The Flash 9 Linux H264 update is available NOW

[LinDVD]

"There is a new beta of the Flash Player Update available. That's right: the beta is even available for Linux (same time as Windows and Mac).

This beta is affectionately named Moviestar due to these key new features:
* H.264 video
* AAC audio
* Hardware-accelerated fullscreen video playback (new for Linux in this beta; Win/Mac had it in previous beta)

Yep-- fullscreen hardware acceleration during video playback using OpenGL/GLX on Linux, where available... and functional. If you find that it does not work right, you can disable hardware acceleration using the "Settings..." menu from the right-click context menu. Oh, and file a bug with hardware details, video card driver version, GLX version, that sort of stuff.

If you have any questions about the new audio/video stuff, check Tinic's thorough blog post on the matter.

I would also like to hear if anyone is still experiencing the click bug (where no events are triggered in response to mouse clicks)."

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

Now, how well it actually works is another matter...

Youtube already does.

[Paradox]

Highly doubt all you want, but AppleTVs already pull raw h264 streams. So do iPhones.

Re:Youtube already does.

[afidel]

From YouTube?

Re:Youtube already does.

[Paradox]

Yes. From YouTube.