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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
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.
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.
Just use a style sheet. In HTML5 the video tag is no different from any other tag.
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.
It's not so much the incompatibilities (although support for non x86-32 platforms has always been very poor on Linux), but the inefficiencies. There's *no* reason for a 320x240 web video to bring a modern system to its knees (GPU acceleration or not).
Even VLC's somewhat buggy FLV implementation plays flash videos with 1/10 the CPU cycles that the flash player does.
Flash's performance is borderline acceptable on Windows, although the mac version (PPC especially!) is appallingly bad.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
But Noscript can block video tags, so what's your point?
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
I really don't understand what the issues are, and would like to know.
A good web page holds two important properties: it uses open standards and it provides semantic information about itself. Flash provides neither.
The first one is pretty straight forward. Flash is not open. The content of a Flash file is known only by Adobe. Only Adobe can reliably produce an application to write and play Flash files. This is in contrast with the openness of the web. This is important to ensure that web content will work on every platform. Flash content will not work on platforms not supported by Adobe, instead of not supported by any community. A good example of how bad this is, is that most Flash objects won't play on mobile devices, since Adobe has yet to produce proper Flash plugins for those platforms.
Secondly, the semantics. Instead of neatly fitting into the DOM and providing sementaic information about it's content like every other proper element, a Flash object is simply a blob of binary data. It's impossible for an automated system to find out what the object is about, thus providing difficulties with indexability, making it hard to find out information about the object using search engines.
That is why Flash is bad.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
What OS is this on? I've had similar results under Windows, but under Linux it's quite common for flash to completely lock up my browser, about once a day.
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.
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?" `":" #");}
I have encountered many, many people who think that anything running at HD resolutions is HD. Even in the geek community. And it seems very difficult to convince them otherwise. Many seem convinced that any video that is playing back at 1080 lines is utilising "full HD resolution", even if the source is a 360x240 video that's been maximised. Even Youtube's "720p" video is so compressed the artifacts are plainly visible, yet because it's 720 lines and is activated by clicking an "HD" button, pundits seem to think that it's high definition video.
As for whether he is blind or mistaken, realise - most people with HD res screens still have never seen HD video up close and personal, thus it's easy to understand why a scaled, interlaced, lossy video might look "pixel perfect" to them compared to other traditional sources like XVID dvd rips or even DVDs. For instance, most people with an HD screen don't actually have a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive. And even of those with a Blu-ray drive (its coming standard more frequently thesedays) many have never actually gone out and bought a Bluray title and chucked it in.
If any of you readers fall into this category (not actually having seen real HD video playback up close), don't worry - you're not at all alone. There's an easy solution:
1. Head over to trailers.apple.com and download a decent 1080p HD trailer. Here's a nice one: http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/2012/hd/
2. Start saving for the Bluray drive you now simply MUST have.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Tool support.
Flash's biggest bonus is that it is one big lump you can just stick on a webpage and it'll run. Adobe's Flash creation tools are basically a standard vector graphics package with animation support — hell canvas doesn't even have builtin tweening as far as I'm aware.
Someone really needs to cook up a JS package for canvas [Basically equivalent to the flash standard library] then write a tool to allow easy production of a canvas based animation without needing to do much manual JS coding.