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Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube
An anonymous reader writes "Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."
Yes, when video sites change, we can say goodbye to flash, because nobody uses Flash for navigation, casual online games, interactive information displays, or google maps street view...we have a long ways until we can say goodbye to Flash
On OS X this has been available for ages, switchs all youtube videos to HTML5 and is extensible for other placse like Dailymotion. http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
slashdotted already?
Any mirror or a proper link?
Fear is the mind-killer.
The biggest problem isn't support for , but common support for major video formats. Seems there's no codec supported by all browsers anytime soon.
I'm waiting for "HTML5VideoBlock" to go along with FlashBlock, because it won't take long for irritating adverts to start using the option. To be honest, I'm surprised it hasn't started already...
I'd love to see this added to the Opera browser on my TP2. The included YouTube app works okay, but having support in the browser would be terrific.
Does this mean easier, faster, higher quality pr0n?
That's what really drives innovation!
Anytime you submit a story and one of your sentences starts with "Personally,", leave it out. We don't care.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Now will we be able to get hardware video acceleration through VDPAU, etc so that I can play it on my Zotac ION media center or low power laptop?
As some of the above posters mentioned: There is still a lot of Flash use on stuff besides videos on the Net.
Also, I think that Adobe is definitely going to give Google a call one of these days (if they haven't already), and offer something to keep the default to Flash for some time being: I would not believe that they will let this one slide so easily.
Other than that, I can't really understand the hate for Flash(players), besides maybe OS incompatibilities.
I'm on WinXP myself, so I would not know anything about that, but for me Flashplayers are one of the better alternatives around for playing video content on the web: Quicktime, Realplayer and Windows Media plugins all suck monkeyballs.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
http://astral.armadamusic.nl/
(Terrible) example of full flash website...
ClickToFlash for Safari (similar to the FlashBlock plugin for Firefox) already does this, letting you load the H.264 video with QuickTime inline where the Flash video would normally go
because nobody uses Flash for [list of uses of flash]
By way of anal extraction, I arrive at the conclusion that 90% of the eyeball wall time spent looking at flash is spent looking at videos.
(89% of those 90% being youtube + google video, another 0.5% being redtube).
Once we get to HTML5 video being popular, flash will become much more a niche thing. There's a long way between "niche" and "dead", but I don't know that we need to cross that gap. Heck, I still see Java applets around (for Rubik's Cube animations; I think that's one niche where they're used well).
On the other hand, if we RTFS:
The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported
Note that IE is not on the list. Make an educated guess about the implications for the penetration of the video tag.
Cool, all of the youtube videos have been replaced with
"Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again."
What an improvement in load time too!
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Yeah, except for all the major sites that will continue to use Silverlight since Microsoft is paying them to annoy OS X and Linux users even more than using Flash.
Your comment on ClickToFlash (for Safari) should score a 5.
Today Webconverger released with an HTML5 video enabled build today: http://webconverger.org/blog/entry/5.7_with_Firefox_3.5/
The plan is once HTML5 video becomes prevalent, the integrated proprietary flash player will be dropped. http://webconverger.org/adobe/
Also, does anyone know how well this works for FreeBSD?
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
I just tried it with FF 3.5.5 (on Linux), and got nothing but a non-working clone of the YouTube player. It's been the same story with YouTube's HTML5 demo for some time as well.
If it's a windows-only thing, or Chrome-only, then it's not good enough to replace Flash yet.
If video content is served directly in a video tag, it will be just as easy to download as images on a web page. Content providers know this and won't use the video tag.
One reason content providers use Flash instead of just letting you download the video file is that Flash (ostensibly) prevents you from downloading the video. While it's true that there are plug-ins for Firefox to let you download Flash videos, the people who use them are a small minority. Even with the video tag, Flash will still be widely used to "protect" the content.
I void warranties.
Only uses ~8% CPU on safari vs ~30% for the same video through the safari flash plugin.
Sigger than your average
Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube
Sweet! HTML5 Viewer for YouTube, that's slightly entertaining. Oops, now I'm tired of HTML5. How about a Java player? When I get tired of that, we can try Silverlight.
I think the only real complaint i have heard from people about Flash "going away" is the fact that it makes things less portable.
But really, it doesn't make things less portable if you are smart about it.
Currently you can already embed binary information in JavaScript, convert it to Base64 and set it as a source.
There are already several pretty decent templating libraries out there as well.
Essentially, we have replaced SWF with JS, which is a good thing since with JS you will have a lot more freedoms in how you code things.
HTML5 *never* proposed a requirement for only a single format. Companies were free to include whatever new and superior formats they wanted.
What it did propose was recommending a baseline format that everyone should support (non-mandatory, but recommended). The standard includes the facilities for detecting which formats are supported and allowing the server and the client to work out the best which is mutually available.
Because of the enormous importance of free and open-source software on the internet the royalty encumbered formats were a total non-starter for baseline status.
Unfortunately the W3C allowed MPEG patent holders Apple, and Nokia to block the adoption of a royalty free baseline. Their argument was primarily that Theora was inferior to the best available, but that really doesn't make sense as an argument against a baseline. The same Nokia shill is now working in the IETF against the Xiph and Skype developers to block the IETF from working on a new royalty free audio codec for high quality VoIP (http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/codec/current/msg00269.html). Don't fall for the political games.
On Chrome, works fine but no visible CPU usage improvement.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Has anyone got a patch to make (Linux) Firefox play all formats natively, that e.g. ffmpeg plays? (It could use that exact library.) I don't care for any stupid imaginary "IP" laws and shit like that. I want all formats to work. No matter if the FF team lives in the real world or not. ^^
Anyone?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Is it just me or does the Neosmart website have a terrible time pulling the videos from YouTube. The player interface seems to load but no video. A lot of people seem to have problems with Flash. I really don't understand what the issues are, and would like to know. I've been using Flash on Firefox/Windows for years and it has done its job so well that I've forgotten its there - which is exactly what I expect from something like Flash.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Why do we want to watch videos inside a web page? This is something I've never understood, and the first time I saw YouTube it looked like an extremely dumb idea. There must be better ways of distributing video on the Internet. I always use clive when somebody sends me a youtube/vimeo link, but I'd much rather get a link to the actual file.
I'm probably just an old-fashioned geek, but I like to focus on whatever I'm doing. When I'm watching a video, I'd rather not watch any extraneous crap around it. It's an issue of both screen real estate and attention. Now get off my lawn!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I noticed something wierd on the family Vista boxes that I take care of. They are all set to save power by sleeping after 30minutes of idleness, and that used to work fine, but most of them now never sleep.
It turns out that if a user watches a YouTube video in a browser and leaves that tab open to YouTube, it prevents Vista from auto-sleeping. Even if the video finished loading and playing days ago.
Manually invoking sleep still works, and closing all the browser tabs with YouTube brings auto sleep back. [Usually -- a few other flash sites cause the same problem, but it's 99.9% YouTube in real life.]
or use any of the many apps that can search and play youtube videos, totem, moovida, miro, maemo youtube, canola ...
the page itself says that firefox doesn't support mp4 videos in HTML5 due to some license restrictions.
Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow
I just did a purely unscientific comparison of CPU usage comparing the native YouTube page and NeoSmart's HTML5 viewer. I tested a couple of different videos and did each one multiple times. I'm running Safari 4.0.3 and Flash 10.0.32.18 on OSX 10.4.11. I was consistently seeing 15-20% more CPU usage with the HTML5 viewer than with YouTube's Flash viewer.
Of course, when I downloaded the MP4 and played it in Quicktime it was much nicer to my CPU (but obviously not nearly as convenient).
What's even more problematic for all of those who want to see Flash die in a fire - Flash Player 10.1 should see performance improvements for playing video if I'm not mistaken (as well as in a number of other areas in regards to performance and resource usage). Meaning the HTML5 implementations will have that much more catching up to do from a performance perspective. (This has nothing to do with other concerns regarding Flash, like openness, security, etc. but the summary specifically called out performance)
You mileage certainly may vary (and please feel free to chime in with your results), but being that my laptop is my main machine - for my battery's sake, I'll stick with watching videos via Flash for now.
There are a good number of youtube videos that fail to load on the iphone, saying something like the format is not supported. I tested this script on some of these videos, and they all work.
This script definitely earns a link on my home screen. Now if they would only write similar scripts for the other video sharing sites.
By all means, someone explain to me why the <Video> tag is in any way better than the <Embed> tag that's existed for 1.4.5 years now, and why it's going to rescue the world from Flash, which took over because people decided they didn't want to use <Embed> anymore...
I'll just hold my breath...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I can't get it to work at all on my Vista Business laptop if FF or IE. Not even the Google Labs version works. I'm more looking forward to the next version of Flash that I think is supposed to offload to GPU.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Flash runs for sh*t on linux and OSX because Adobe's code is NOT accelerated for anything other than Windows DirectX APIs. Flash uses OpenGL libs and doesn't provide full screen acceleration with desktop compositing software. ie: If I run flash video under linux, and have compiz or beryl enabled, flash vids are terrible in full-screen, but after disabling compiz/beryl, full-screen works much better, though, it still isn't perfect. (deadbeefcafe) hooked me up with the following info: Problem is Firefox, has been fixed in latest builds (not yet officially released). It's fixed in 3.5.3 apparently, there's a patch you can apply to the source on the bugzilla somewhere. There's a workaround in the meantime, if you want to wait for the fix to make it to the stable releases, you need to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD to /usr/lib/libGL.so.1
There's a few ways to do this, I put "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1" into my .bashrc as a quick hack; prior to that (because I couldn't be bothered restarting X) I modified the .desktop file so that it ran "env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/libGL.so.1 firefox %s" instead of "firefox %s".
The reason you're getting slowness is because you've disabled hardware acceleration as part of your troubleshooting.
I followed this bit of info, and BAM! my flash videos work well in full screen.
I don't have a solution for OSX, but this may help Linux'ers. lol
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
That's 14.5 years now... June 1995.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
LMAO!! So the entire web should change for your combined global user base of 7% of market share cause flash does not work on your platform? Um think about that for a sec.... Seeing as the rest of us 93% user base has no complaints.. time for you to take a page out of your own advertising and make a switch to a platform that is useful, yes I know, no shiny shinny but works like a freakin charm!
And hey on the plus side you won't have to worry about paying 30$ to have deleted data from a user account. Get so tired of crapple users bashing flash when the only reason they has such a small market share is music. I know its gotta hurt seeing as almost ever band uses flash for there web site!! LOL! Deal with reality much?!! Hahahaa
Anyone else starting to notice how crapple fans are the new republicans? heres a break down for you.
They blindly follow what ever the talking points are! Regardless of the reality!
They can only advertise on attack add's and not there own os's merits!
They live in a constant state of denial of the reality's of computing, i.e osx is no safer than any other os connected to a network!
They are just the party of hate these days. Why is it when reading a article on windows a crapple fan has to chime in on a subject that has nothing to do with them? its a sign of insecurity! And makes people hate you even more that they already do.
And the main reason you will never win more converts than you have.... Arrogance! As a windows user and programmer you have no clue who to base your complaints against. i.e. most of us win users are quite happy with what we have and most have no problem yet arrogant crapple users alway love to tell windows users how bad there systems are, when they, don't even use the same os or have a clue what they are talking aobut! I don't know a single person who has had a blue screen of death after service pack 2 for xp!
Reading crapple fan's comments are akin to reading a Pallin speech, its entertaining for a min cause the sheer audacity then it just become sad.... sad... sad... Yup just like the GOP! And global warming is just a myth! lol!!!
View flash videos on VLC.
Personally, I prefer to have the browser load such video in an external player that treats it like streaming media, though stability isn't my reason. I like having the full controls of the external player available and I like being able to easily resize the window that plays the video.
Then you will love this. Let the flash video load and pause it at the beginning. Then fire up the terminal and type:
vlc /tmp/Flash*
It works with at least vimeo and youtube.
``I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash.''
and then we will finally be where we could have been, had people just used HTML4's object element.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
For browsers that don't support H.264, you can submit the Youtube URL to tinyvid. The first time that video is requested it takes a few minutes to transcode, but you get a URL for the resulting OGG/Theora file to embed elsewhere right away.
Here's a bookmarklet :-)
javascript:void(location.href=%22http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/index.php?url=%22+location.href)
Same here. I hate Flash. It's pointless. Between AJAX, PHP, and CSS, there's very little Flash offers beyond video provision.
Yes, Flash does animation. As long as it does animation, Fine. When they began expanding ActionScript because all the Lingo programmers needed a home, that's when it went off the rails, and that was a long time ago.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Embed is not a standard element. It's not part of the W3C spec at all, but instead a proprietary element created by Netscape.
Besides that, it's totally unsemantic. What kind of file is being embedded? No automated system can tell, so no search for you.
Why on earth would anyone in their right mind create a website using this element in this day and age?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
than to see a free, open replacement for Flash (okay, that might be an exaggeration). This isn't even close though.
Looks vaguely similar to http://www.youtube.com/html5
The way to view the video is to use an external site (NeoSmart's site to be precise) to find the MP4 on Google's servers and display it using the video tag. All the script does is add a link to the YouTube page that redirects you to NeoSmart's viewer.
A far better solution would be something like YouTube Without Flash Auto or YouTube Perfect, both of which (among other features) locate the MP4 client-side and present the video right in the YouTube page using whatever plugin you assigned to play MP4 files. If this can be pulled off without involving any external sites, I see no reason that a conversion to HTML5 video tags can't be done the same way.
Disclaimer: using those scripts to view YouTube outside of the Flash player violates the ToS.
You asked for it...
Playing video in an embed tag requires the user to have a platform-specific plugin installed. The user interface you get depends on the specific plugin used and can only be customized in a plugin-specific way. The Javascript API offered by the player is also plugin-specific and probably not as useful as the standard API provided by the video tag. Loading the plugin will often freeze the user's browser for several seconds and/or cause crashes. Plugins don't play nice with CSS opacity and z-order and are often buggy with respect to positioning, resizing, full-page zoom, and DOM manipulation. New advanced CSS features like transforms and animation are not likely to play nice with plugins either.
Flash took over from embed because it provided a customizable UI, consistent API, workable fullscreen mode, and reliable codec support. The video tag has the first two of these and is likely to get fullscreen support soon. Unfortunately codec support is a sticking point...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Originally as proposed included a baseline royalty-free format. So unlike embed, you could actually expect video to work for people.
Since that was removed all that remains is a uniform control API, which includes capability sniffing so you can detect support and response correctly using JS. Still a far cry from what it could have been, and a far cry from competing with flash. Everyone knows flash sucks but everyone uses it for video because you know it will work almost 100% of the time.
Without a baseline format HTML5 simply can't compete.
With video specs in HTML5 and banishment from iPhone, Adobe is fighting an uphill battle to stay in the mix.
http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/
First page:
http://www.google.com/search?q=html5+audio
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because as things are now you need 1 particular binary blob from 1 particular company to have a full feature internet experience.
It's buggy, it's crashy and if there is an exploit everyone is vulnerable.
You can chose not to run Windows, you can chose not to use IE but you can not chose not to to have Flash. How is is this not a bad thing?
By all means, someone explain to me why the <Video> tag is in any way better than the <Embed> tag that's existed for 1.4.5 years now, and why it's going to rescue the world from Flash, which took over because people decided they didn't want to use <Embed> anymore...
I'll just hold my breath...
Because the embed tag is nonstandard. The standard for that would be "Object". And if the usage examples are decent, the video tag is simpler.
Could this mean someday I might be able to watch youtube on my OpenBSD system? IIRC there is no native FLASH support on any *BSD.
I have to return some videotapes...
You're kidding yourself to think replacing video players with html 5 is going to kill flash. All it may do is kill flash for streaming video. It doesn't stop the high end media and graphical usage. Canvas is not sophisticated enough to do high end media stuff that can be done with flash or silverlight.
dynamic, animated HTML looks amazing in the latest versions of webkit.
And even if you anticipate a lot of traffic from users of Internet Explorer, which has tended to lag severely in its implementation of web technologies, you can always have your users open the site in a Chrome Frame.
The purpose is to minimize proprietary plug-ins. Also, as it stands today HTML5 will need codecs for playing videos, and I consider codecs to be a kind of plug-in.
YouTube uses H.263 for low quality and H.264 for high quality and high definition. But in the United States, home of YouTube, the H.264 codec is a proprietary plug-in because even though H.264 is a published international standard, the H.264 patent license isn't very compatible with free software licensing practices. Unfortunately, due to YouTube's existing investment in H.263 and H.264, I don't see Google switching to Theora any time soon even though Theora is way ahead of H.263 (the current codec for low quality on YouTube) in quality per kbps, with the 1.1 series nearing parity with MPEG-4 ASP codecs like Xvid.
in addition to this, teaching people to install plugins is bad because a plugin could very well contain malware/viruses.
True, but then so could the browser. Yet there really haven't been problems with people going to mozilla.com or getfirefox.com and worrying about whether they are getting the real Firefox and not a trojaned browser
Because Firefox is a well-known brand, people know that the software from getfirefox.com is trustworthy. The Ogg brands are not as famous, and people won't be able to tell the page hosting the official Theora installer for Windows from an equally polished site carrying a trojaned codec.
If the plugin is Open Source (GPL or BSD license or similar) then there's probably no reason that it can't just be included with the browser to eliminate this problem.
YouTube, a U.S. based web site, uses H.264 video. The standard patent license for H.264 in the United States is incompatible with licenses meeting the Open Source Definition.
Given that most of the time Flash _is_ embedded using (typically inside an IE-only ), I can't figure our what the second part of your question is asking.
The tag is better than for video purposes because it gives both the website author and the browser more flexibility (telling the browser this is a video, allowing the author to easily provide the video in multiple codecs, etc). All of this _could_ be done via and a sufficiently good video-playing plug-in, but that just brings us back to Flash.
Note that Flash has lower platform penetration (in the sense of platforms that it's available on) than -supporting browsers do, last I checked.
After all, software patents aren't enforceable in all countries
The article is about YouTube. The laws of any country where YouTube operates matter, and that includes the United States. Other companies with a stake in this debate are also headquartered in the United States: Adobe (maker of Flash Player), Mozilla Corp (maker of Firefox browser, which supports HTML5 video with Theora codec), and Apple (maker of Safari browser, which supports HTML5 video with H.264 codec).
some browsers would be able to implement everything without paying royalties
But they might have to use geolocation to exclude some major countries in the developed world. If a browser doesn't catch on in the United States or those European countries that recognize patents on signal processing methods, it will never gain enough of the global browser market even for web sites not to discriminate against its User-agent string.
works on my iphone, high quality video finally.
Google transcodes all video you upload to YouTube into mp4, IIRC.
Which doesn't change lukas84's conclusion in the slightest. How much does Google, the U.S. based parent of YouTube, pay for 1. the rights under patent law to do this and 2. the extra hard drive space needed to store copies of the video transcoded into multiple codecs? And how much would it cost a company smaller than Google?
So they have to both pay for H.264 which is definitely patented and run the risk of being sued over hidden Theora patents, that's not a good sales pitch.
As opposed to the risk of being sued over hidden H.264 patents? Theora's decoder has been frozen since 2004; any remaining patent claims are likely estopped by laches.
Video is video. Embed is a blob. A blob that could be whatever.
And?
I do like how you ignore OBJECT as well.
Look at the file extension, or read the mime type.. Just like EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE WEB.
If "no automated system can tell" then how could browser plugins possibly work?
Because it doesn't require proprietary software, works on every browser, is much more flexible, and performs extremely well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Why would it be YouTube's job to enforce a patent license for the browser?
YouTube must license the H.264 encoder in order to transcode uploaded videos to H.264 for streaming. In addition, YouTube's parent company has its fingers in just about every web browser pie: it distributes the Chrome browser and Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer, and it pays Mozilla a commission for text advertisements on search result pages from the Firefox browser's search bar.
In what way is Quicktime et al. "platform specific" while Flash is not?
The interface of every web-page is browser and user-specific. I don't see the problem. In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface. I have yet to see a single case where some Flash video player had any positive site-specific customizations.
A) Baseless nonsense.
B) Flash is an embedded plugin. It certainly can certainly do all of the above things.
C) There's no reason to assume the video tag can't an wont do the above.
D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use.
Fullscreen and positioning have always worked fine with plugins.
Sites built custom UI's on top of embedded media players long before flash got video support. They also pretty much all had fullscreen support, and great performance to boot.
The installed-base for Windows Media playback was 93%+... Flash started getting a foothold long before it even came close to rivaling that, so that's certainly no explanation. And now, you have 3 different versions of the flash player, with 3 different supported codecs to deal with... Wonderfully inconsistent.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Pasting "http://www.youtube.com/html5" in the HTML5 Viewer gave me the message "Unauthorized URL!" ?
Which would be more possible with <video>. I have yet to see a Flash/WMP/QuickTime plugin that allows you to mess with the UI in any way. Flash allows the site to code their own video player UI but that's it.
Such as? Except for Flash and video (via Flash) <embed> and <object> aren't used for much.
Newsflash: Firefox has a nonzero market share. The Flash z-order bug has plagued Fx for quite some time as Firefox uses its rendering engine to display the browser GUI - including context menus. Until the problem was finally fixed, Flash videos displayed in front of any context menus (or even regular menus) you opened if they happened to overlap.
Plus, even as a non-professional web designer: Shut up if you don't know what you're talking about. Control over the z-order of elements can be important and CSS opacity is only not used widely* yet because the browsers are dragging their heels getting there. Yes, the internet worked in 1998. Still doesn't mean that CSS1 and HTML4 are the alpha and omega of content presentation.
* Excepting, of course, any website that uses a framework like script.aculo.us, which allows its use for some transition effects.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Because it doesn't require proprietary software
Apart from the fact that it IS proprietary software.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Well for starters lets you fall back to Flash if no other codec is available. So you stand at least some chance of decent performance where supported and where not you loose nothing (assuming you were encoding in h.265 anyway as Google/YouTube now does.)
The SO happens to love Youtube for finding songs she can use with her music students. So she downloads them and then converts/burns the audio tracks to CD. So far only on Windows with some Youtube video downloader&converter program. Anyone have suggestions how she can do this process under Linux (Ubuntu)? Difficulty: It should preferably be a GUI-solution...she's willing to try, but not that technically inclined. I'll help her get set up though if needed.
I'm sorry, I just don't. I know there were flamewars when the stories hit the front page about security issues in Adobe's myriad softwares, including Flash. I'm sure some tried to defend them. But no one can deny that even if they are making a valiant, and quite possibly successful, effort to wipe out the bugs and vulnerabilities, there were flaws in the software. Why should there be a big hullabaloo about a html5 alt for this that would alleviate the problems some people are obviously having? If it's a standard built on sound design and it, as some are fond of saying in order to put Flash on pedestal, just works, it's not like it's going to be mandatory under threat of arrest and prosecution... "As per Intarwebs Content Statute BS-666, sec. 867, para. 5309-blah-blah-blah, 'NO FLASH CONTENT IS ALLOWED. VIOLATORS WILL BE EXECUTED SUMMARY TO ARREST AND TRIAL; ALL HARDWARE AND DIGITAL CONTENT THEREON BECOMES PROPERTY OF THE STATE...etc...'"... Grow up. If there's a site that makes a unilateral decision to go solely one way or the other, and this renders it unusable for you, your beef is with that site. Get over it. Competition is good; who knows, perhaps Adobe might work even harder to make Flash the optimum choice, thereby improving user experience across the board.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
Well, really that's socioeconomic-debate fodder, rather than a question of technology, now isn't it? Off-topic much?
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
...but it doesn't work. Video doesn't play and the link to the MP4 version of any video is broken. Is this the Slashdot effect? The site itself does work, just not the video...
And yes, I have chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree installed.
I am not devoid of humor.
Because it was supposed to include a universally-supported set of baseline codecs. Which Nokia sh[uoa]t down, and IE never planned on supporting it anyway, so yeah.
It's useful for the same reasons we have an tag instead of for images.
in Chromium Kubuntu Karmic I get this: PHP Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgt_WDjbO0o) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 402 Payment Required in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\neosmart.net\YouTube5\youtube-core.php on line 8
Seems Google doesn't like it when a third party site modifies its content without approval. By the current error message it seems YouTube returns a '402 Payment Required' status message rather than the requested page.
Have you ever tried the Flash10 based online Audiotool http://www.hobnox.com/audiotool/. It will only load on a system with 1GB or more of Ram and a CPU of 2Ghz minimum. Try it on a system with less and watch your system slow to a crawl. Its a great tool and a haven for old school DJs who dreamed of using that equipment back in the day. If audiotool could be re-worked using HTML5, that would the ultimate hack that deserves an award!
In what way is Quicktime et al. "platform specific" while Flash is not?
Quicktime runs on two platforms: OS X and Windows, and many Windows machines don't have it. It sorta runs on iPhone but the codec support and user interface is completely different. Flash runs on four platforms: OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris, and is commonly installed on all of them. Flash isn't as cross-platform as the web itself, but it's better than any other video plugin.
As for your "et al." Windows Media player is obviously platform specific, and there are no other widely-deployed video plugins. Also, the WMP plugin for non-IE browsers is no longer shipped with Windows as of Vista.
The interface of every web-page is browser and user-specific. I don't see the problem.
Not sure what you mean by that. Sure, there are differences between browsers, but they're nothing like the differences between Quicktime and Windows Media Player.
In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface.
So you're seriously suggesting that instead of the video tag we should have many competing video plugins with different UIs, APIs, and supported codecs, which users should choose and install based on their preference, and then every website should support all of them to enable user choice? Now that I think about it, I guess that's actually a pretty accurate description of the way things worked before Flash video. Minus the "every website should support all of them" because that never happened.
A) Baseless nonsense.
B) Flash is an embedded plugin. It certainly can certainly do all of the above things.
C) There's no reason to assume the video tag can't an wont do the above.
D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
A) You're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong.
B) Flash can and does do all of these things; that's why the video tag is better than Flash. However, Flash does have the advantage over other video plugins because it's so widely used it's almost always already in RAM before the user visits your page, so you don't get the loading delay.
C) The reason to believe it won't is that it doesn't. Have you even tried it?
D) Complete non sequitur. I'm sorry, but the video tag doesn't feed the hungry or bring world peace either.
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use. Fullscreen and positioning have always worked fine with plugins.
A quick Google search for "flash z-index" will prove you wrong. I can only assume you've never written a lot of code dealing with plugins because frustrations and limitations are everywhere. Also, the Quicktime plugin doesn't support fullscreen at all. Never has. The WMP plugin does, but the default UI doesn't even provide a button for it. You just have to know to double-click or right-click.
And now, you have 3 different versions of the flash player, with 3 different supported codecs to deal with.
According to Adobe, >90% of browsers have Flash 10 with H.264 installed. >99% of browsers have Flash 9 with at least VP6, and some number in between (likely on the high end) have Flash 9 with H.264. That's only 2 codecs you need to worry about, and in reality likely only one.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Yah I'm sick of flash it seems Adobe's flash dev team only get worse at writing stable and efficient code over time. The OSX flash plugin for both X86 and PPC is crap and the linux version a crashing boar.
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