Jobs Says Flash Video Not Suitable for iPhone

Lev13than writes "Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said the iPhone won't be using Adobe Systems' Inc.'s popular Flash media player any time soon, saying the technology doesn't meet his company's performance standards for video. Jobs said the version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone while the mobile version of the media player is "is not capable of being used with the web." The comments come a day before Apple is set to introduce the company's plan for iPhone SDK, the software developers kit which will allow third-party developers to create applications that can work in conjunction with the popular handheld device."

Comments

Another way of saying that

[Anonymous Coward]

the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad.

Re:Another way of saying that

[LiquidCoooled]

Why is this a troll, its exactly what the problem is.
My n810 runs flash - badly - its advertised as working which it does but it drops frames with current implimentation.

iPhone/Apple users expect more and currently it can't be handled.

Re:Another way of saying that

[QuantumG]

Ignoring for now that you're not only a troll but also off-topic, and an AC, I'm going to reply and say that I don't even know what window manager I'm using. It's the makers of my distro chose for me. If I don't like it I can go dig for a replacement, but frankly I'm quite happy with it. Does this mean it was pointless having all those different window managers out there? No. Because I am not the only person on Earth.. my choice, or absence of one, is not the only one that counts. Besides, someone made a choice of what window manager to ship to me.. and they had a choice of many window managers to decide from. As I'm typically happy with their choices, it seems that having a choice of window managers is working out for me, even if I couldn't be bothered making it myself.

Now back in your box.

Re:Another way of saying that

[jellomizer]

Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible. Many companies get so caught up in giving the most features and end up making a product that using most of the features are clumsy or to much of a pain to use. The iPhone isn't perfect but I actually use it more then my laptop because it has the features that I really need 75% of the time.

Re:Another way of saying that

[kalirion]

Setting aside the horsepower, what use is flash video with a connection speed of @10KB/s?

Re:Another way of saying that

[ShinmaWa]

Funny, Apple used to be about "choice" Apple used to be about choice in the same way that Ford was: "You have your Model T in any color you like, so long as it's black."

Apple has never been about choice. You can run their operating system on any hardware you like, so long as they made it. You can sync your iPod with any software you like, so long as it's iTunes. You can use your iPhone with any carrier you like, so long as it's one the Apple chose for you.

Not surprised

[nighty5]

Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks on OS X. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%.

It's not to say its Apple's fault, but I think Adobe is at fault and I think their position won't change in any time soon.

Re:Not surprised

[ncryptd]

It's much better on x86 -- it used to be absolutely horrid on the PowerPC platform. Given my past experience with Flash on non-x86 architectures, I'm not surprised that Flash on ARM isn't a high-performance solution.

Re:Not surprised

[jcr]

Smarter people have blamed the atrocious coding in Adobe's flash interpreter. There's no excuse for busy-wait loops.

-jcr

Can't say that I disagree

[pembo13]

I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video in both WindowsXP and Linux using Adobe's Flash plugin. The same machines played media via the divx plugin without issue (at much better quality)

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[tacocat]

Websites fall into generally two categories: Information Delivery and Entertainment Delivery.

Information Delivery are websites where you are seeking some kind of information or news that you desire in your daily life. Examples of this are google, amazon, slashdot, ebay, bbc, csmonitor.com for most. This also includes sites for mysql, apache, postgresql, perl/cpan. These are all sites that, when you visit you often have a very specific purpose and end goal in mind.

Entertainment Delivery are sites that offer no hard end goal other than entertainment and can be represented by youtube, ask a ninja, webkinz, and other online game sites. On these sites, the web content is the entertainment and people would have more expectations of lots of flash load on their PC.

But there seems to be a lot of manufacturers and resale sites that are trying to do both at the same time and for most, they do an amazingly bad job without any real thought of delivering informational content about their products but just wowing the crap out of some board members. I tried to buy some Serengeti sunglasses because my experience has been that they are the best I've ever owned. But their website is one of the fattest and annoying places I've been to in years. And they don't even properly identify how to purchase their glasses. Had I been a marginal customer I would have walked a long time ago. In the past, I have walked from suppliers because their product catalog brought down my computer to a crawl and didn't do anything to provide me the information I needed.

Flash does not belong on Information Delivery websites.

Re:"performance standard"

[deathtopaulw]

that makes no sense, the more video/audio capabilities a device has the more people are going to buy it

remember apple makes money on the hardware not the songs/vids from itunes

Analysis

[DigitalisAkujin]

A lot of people will construe this as simply Apple trying to control media on the Iphone which although it does make sense that people would think this way, it's definitely not true.

Flash is optimized for windows. It has no where near the right optimization to run on OSX at full speed. Further compounding the issue is that the CPU must do all the decoding work where on a proper player the decoding could partially be offloaded to a GPU (in a full PC), or optimized CPU with support for certain optimized instruction sets.

Re:youtube, anyone?

[Zelos]

IIRC, the iPhone plays Youtube videos converted to H264 using a native client, not Flash video.

Suits Me

[AndrewStephens]

Lets face it, Flash is used for four things:

Video: Flash video is becoming the dominant video delivery mechanism for the web, its only competition is Quicktime. Perhaps flash video does take large amounts of processing power to decode (the Wii certainly doesn't do a very good job), but I suspect that Apple doesn't care too much if people find a reason not to serve video content in flash rather than quicktime.

Ads and sneaky cookie storage: Flash ads are annoying, and rather worryingly Flash programs can store rather large amounts of data in a sort of large cookie on your computer. This is often used to identify a user even if they have disabled cookies. Good riddance.

Games: it is a shame that flash games will never work on the iPhone, but this is somewhat understandable. The iPhone does not have keyboard and the pointing device works in a very different way to a mouse. Most games would not work well without recoding them for the iPhone and battery life would be bad since the screen would be continually updating.

Apps: well actually there are only a handful of sites I know of the actually use flash for something that couldn't be done in HTML. Mobile Safari is actually one of the more capable browsers out there, even compared to desktop browsers.

Additionally, while I don't doubt there are technical reasons for the decision, Adobe and Apple have always had a love/hate relationship - there may be political reasons why Apple wants to shut Flash out.

Re:"performance standard"

[ronin510]

Have you used the iPhone? I listen to audio podcasts and watch videos directly through the Safari browser. Any website can provide such files without having Apple as a proxy.

Sure, there's the special YouTube application. What it basically does is link to h.264 converted videos, but as I said, any website can provide videos in that format. Having videos play via h.264 benefits iPhone users, and standards enthusiasts, actually. The iPhone has a dedicated h.264 chip to more efficiently decode such files. This is a much more energy efficient solution compared to decoding flash videos through software. So in truth, the "performance standard" you mock is a reality.

Re:youtube, anyone?

[AceJohnny]

Flash video (flv) is a container around codecs, like AVI, OGG, and even MPEG is. The codec typically used in Flash is by On2, I believe. I guess Jobs is complaining about Adobe's mobile implementation of the decoder.

However, Adobe recently added support for H.264 in Flash. H.264 is more widespread and there are hardware-accelerated implementations for it in the mobile field. Youtube has started supporting that codec as well (add &fmt=6 at the end of video URL to try, if that video has been converted)

Hell, I worked on a mobile chip which includes MPEG4 and H264 encode/decode acceleration, which has been included in a recently announced Nokia smartphone, and I can confirm that On2 aren't accelerated (and Microsoft's VC1, used in DVB-H, is only partly accelerated), and thus have to run on the ARM core, at the expense of higher power consumption.

A: Because it disturbs the flow of a message

[DNS-and-BIND]

Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line irritating?

It's the API, stupid ;-)

[Kifoth]

Has anyone seen Flash's Actionscript lately? AS3 is a respectable programming language (Flame away :P). Considering that Jobs never wanted an iPhone API at all, if he lets Flash on the iPhone, he'll be opening the door to a rival API that he has little control over.

Re:"performance standard"

[bhtooefr]

Because the iPhone is downloading the H.264 vids direct from YouTube's site, rather than playing them in a flash-based player. ;)