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A Skeptical Comparison of HTML5 Video Playback To Flash
gollum123 writes "Think we'd all be better off if HTML5 could somehow instantly replace Flash overnight? Not necessarily, according to a set of comparisons from Jan Ozer of the Streaming Learning Center website, which found that while HTML5 did come out ahead in many respects, it wasn't exactly a clear winner. They did find that HTML5 clearly performed better than Flash 10 or 10.1 in Safari on a Mac, although the differences were less clear cut in Google Chrome or Firefox. On the other hand, Flash more than held its own on Windows, and Flash Player 10.1 was actually 58% more efficient than HTML5 in Google Chrome on the Windows system tested. As you may have deduced, one of the big factors accounting for that discrepancy is that Flash is able to take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration in Windows, while Adobe is effectively cut out of the loop on Mac."
gollum123 also links to additional tests indicating that Flash "does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows."
The second test seems to forget that Flash added GPU acceleration in Windows, which dramatically drops CPU usage. It's not even small amount, it's 60%->12% with YouTube 720p video and most likely even more with 1080p. They've been working a lot with NVIDIA on it, which means more bad news for HTML5. I also installed those new NVIDIA drivers and newest Flash beta and full screen video is considerably smoother.
And where's Opera in this test? They added HTML5 support in 10.5 final too and their whole drawing engine will be hardware accelerated, with websites also. Their canvas implementation is also faster than with any other browser.
How much of a performance hit am I prepared to accept for open standards? 100%. The performance of the open platform will double every 18 months, but the DRM'd content will be forever limited.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As soon as the video tag becomes popular implementations using the GPU will appear, and will not only work in Windows. We will be farther better off.
And if Google open sources the VP8 codec the just purchased, it will be even better.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Open standards and DRM don't really have much to do together. Merely because the underlying system is open standard doesn't mean it cannot have DRM system implemented in it. Two different matters.
The author implies that adobe can't use gpu for flash on mac. Why not? Is he getting confused with iphone which is different from the mac, at least the last time I checked.
From what I can tell by reading the article that says that 'Flash "does not perform consistently worse on Mac', what they really mean is that not only does Flash run slower on Mac, but Safari is also coded really poorly for Windows.
Sure it gets bashed on Slashdot for not being open source but so what? Slashdotters would love to see Ogg audio take over the world and MP3 die a painful death too, and I don't see that happening either.
They are comparing an internet standard that is not yet finalized to what is supposedly a finished product. HTML5 hasn't even settled on a video codec, so how can there even be a real comparison here? Of course HTML5 can't take advantage of GPU acceleration yet, they don't even know what they'll be accelerating yet! The only thing this article does is point out that HTML5 hasn't had the chance to implement GPU acceleration and that maybe they should consider it as part of their criteria in their codec selection process.
HTML5 and all Web browsers still have a long way to go, but it is a superior standard based on its openness. A small initial performance hit is a small price to pay to help bring sanity to Internet multimedia!
(Signed: Alex Libman's sock-puppet.)
It didn't happen for HTML image formats, even though that wasn't standardized either. In cases like these, de facto standards tend to arise. In this case, it is already pretty clear that the winner will be H.264.
HTML 5 is a clear winner by virtue of not being Adobe Flash or any other proprietary application but an open standard.
You can't handle the truth.
Could someone please tell me what the point of Flash video(or html 5 video) is? I can watch mpeg2 films on clonky old hardware (remember multimedia PCs?) that won't play Flash, so is it just that flv is a smaller filesize? If so, how much smaller? Is it that flv renderers scale better than mpeg2?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Obviously this is anecdotal, but the fans on my Macbook pro often spin up playing full screen flash video, but never while playing video in Quicktime. But even if HTML5 performs no better than Flash currently, HTML5 still wins because it doesn't rely on Adobe to issue security and performance updates.
It does if it is licensed under GPL v3.
Since flash is not fully supported in 64-bit. 64-bit OS:es will not be able to be widely spread.
There are a couple different problems with this statement... I'll just say that I'm posting this from a 64-bit OS and a browser that runs Flash just fine. (Well, as fine as a Flash can be run anyway, which is "not very", but that's sort of beside the point.)
You've just described the tailspin that we're in. To get out of it, somebody must loose face because their device/system is incapable of supporting open and free standards. It's sad that the end users will be collateral damage to this, but the sooner it happens, the better off we'll be.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
gollum123 also links to additional tests indicating that Flash "does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows."
Yes, tests provided by... Mike Chambers of Adobe. I'm sure that they're completely impartial.
When I turn on HTML5 video support at YouTube, the exact same clip in the exact same browser on the exact same OS on the exact same session runs at a third of the CPU power. Sure, it's an anecdote - and one that's been observed by hundreds if not thousands of others, consistently over the years. But according to Adobe, nope, no problems at all. Emperor's clothes look really chic.
Fuck off, Adobe. You had years to improve your damn plugin, and we'll all be better off when it and its horrid performance and security record are no more.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Let's compare an established de facto standard which is a monstrosity beaten into submission over several years, to an experimental implementations of an unfinished standard. Oh, and lets leave out the fact that the new one is perfectly cross-platform and open while the old one isn't.
It's not really fair to compare a technology that is still being developed to others that are very well established. The big benefit of HTML5 is it's non-proprietary nature. Once the standard is adopted and applications are built around it these comparisons will look very different.
By saying "PC and MAC", TFA disregards handheld and small devices. These may be dominant players in the medium term(till they are as powerful as PC's and Macs). HTML5 may have an edge, especially with the iPad attitude of limited Flash support
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
It runs flash in 32-bit mode, dummy.
That's the point, dummy. The post I replied to stated that the unavailability of a 64-bit Flash build was a hindrance to the spread of 64-bit OSs. ("Since flash is not fully supported in 64-bit. 64-bit OS:es will not be able to be widely spread. Try to sell a computer with a new hardware architecture until the day flash supports that new architecture.")
This statement, of course, is complete BS for precisely the reason you and I are pointing out.
(That said, there is a 64-bit experimental build of Flash available for Linux, so saying it's not publicly out isn't 100% correct, just... like 99%.)
Even if the results are real, there are a few shortcoming.
Mainly, the performance issue, especially on MacOS, is
not limited to video. Even plain simple Flash with animated
clip art is a CPU hog. This is what REALLY needs to
be benchmarked and documented.
Then, all videos are not equal. For the same bandwith, when comparing H264 in HTML5 and Flash codec in Flash player, we need to compare the CPU usage AND the final
quality.
Finally, the test should be performed on the same hardware for both MacOS and Windows.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
How does GPL v3 restrict implementing DRM?
It's always possible to use GPLed code to write software that implements DRM. However, if someone does that with code protected by GPLv3, section 3 says that the system will not count as an effective technological "protection" measure. This means that if you break the DRM, you'll be free to distribute your own software that does that, and you won't be threatened by the DMCA or similar laws.
Of course someone could try to fork the code in a way that can output non-DRM'd version of the file, but it's perfectly possible that GPL'd application can implement DRM. The earlier versions of Voddler did this too (though now they've changed to website based system with Flash)
I do use linux, since that doesn't have GPU accelerated flash, I am clearly not all that bothered by it. Oh and I do get performance bonus after all with this.
And will it be all that hard for browsers to pull the same trick as flash did?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Interesting. I had never seen that language before.
Still, it is a pretty big loophole.
Performance is rather secondary. This is about standards and cross-platform compatibility. Flash is an atrocity in this regard, and the earlier it gets tossed out on the trash heap of computing history, the better.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is an issue for browsers like Firefox.
"Only" because Firefox refuses to use something like DirectShow to use whatever codecs are available on the system.
See here for why; they aren't necessarily bad reasons, but changing their opinion on this matter would largely solve the H.264 codec patent issue as far as Firefox is concerned.
check this:
http://jilion.com/sublime/video
So the answer is to let some bug-ridden security-mess proprietary plug-in have direct access to the hardware. Brilliant!
Try having text-to-speech read you a flash-based site some time. So much for ADA compliance on the web. HTML5 will encourage sites to fix this.
-- Cerebus
It's not a crap article because it's true. If you look at the 10.1 public beta release notes it says:
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.
How Apple react to this will be a good litmus test of how fair Steve J is prepared to be with Adobe. Will he make the APIs available to benefit his customers but risk making HTML5 less attractive, or will he just ignore them and play hard ball.
As for Linux, the historical lack of a unified approach to solving this (that includes all interested parties) is going to leave us out in the cold for some time yet. Let's hope that Gallium3D sticks, gains enough traction and doesn't get dropped for something else a few years down the road. That will make a nice change!
That pre-release works - sometimes. I've installed it, and purged all the 32 bit libraries, and had it work well. I've also installed it, only to find that NOTHING works.
BTW - you do realize that the 64 bit pre-release is Linux only? If you're running anything else, you're still stuck with the 32 bit versions, along with the library dependencies, etc.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That statement is totally oblivious of reallity, just like the statement wLAN is flawless on linux. Don't get me wrong, I am a linux user myself, and would never dream of the nightmare to install windows.
What makes you think I'm talking about Linux? Flash works fine on 64-bit Windows, and if you're interested in the practicality of what will prevent the adoption of 64-bit OSs, looking at what goes on with 64-bit Linux doesn't seem particularly relevant to be honest.
Also, are you trying to run the 64-bit Flash alpha, or are you running the 32-bit build with a 32-bit browser?
I don't care if Flash is 50% faster than HTML5 video. I don't want the vulnerability-laden Flash on my primary OS just to watch a YouTube video. Period.
I guess this is beside the point, but I feel required to point out that if you start by losing 100% performance it doesn't matter how many times you double your now 0 performance, it will always still be 0 performance.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
Besides which you confuse and conflate free, open standards and DRM all into one. For example h264 is an open standard but its not free (although the majority of people get it for free through a plugin or their OS, or the patent laws of their land). Additionally h264 could be bundled up in a regular mp4 or mkv container without any DRM but someone could wrap it up in DRM if they wanted. Someone could even wrap theora (a free and open standard) up with DRM if they so wished.
I don't know about him but I tried your link on my netbox, a 1.8GHz Sempron running XP Home, and it kept the CPU redlined while the video was a slideshow, even though the video was just a tiny slice on the screen, while only having two tabs open (this page and the video). Meanwhile Youtube H.264 in SD plays just fine full screen and plays nicely even with multiple tabs open.
Was that the point you were trying to make? Or was it that the link you provided was to a "better" HTML5 player? Because if I'm gonna have to fire up my quad just to watch a video in HTML5 I'll stick with Flash, thanks anyway. I can always slap a cheap 4650 into the AGP slot if I want to get HD on this single core PC, thanks to hardware acceleration. Can I do that with HTML5?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
PS : a dsp is not magic, you have limitation and can't make all codec work on it
A DSP is a specialized CPU. If Theora takes far fewer cycles to decode than H.264 on one CPU, it will probably take far fewer cycles to decode than H.264 on another CPU.
So the answer is to let some bug-ridden security-mess proprietary plug-in have direct access to the hardware.
No, let the plug-in have access to the hardware through a hardware abstraction layer. Several steps of block-transform video decoding aren't too different from pixel shading, yet video games using pixel shaders don't have destructive access to the hardware.
Not necessarily. I could pipe content which I have decrypted and validated from a DRM'd container to a GPLv3 application for decoding. Alternatively I might modify the GPL app to call out to my proprietary process to decode the content for much the same effect. Nothing to stop me doing that at all. I could even supply the source of my modifications and it wouldn't necessarily help someone crack the DRM. If it was an LGPL v3 library (as most codecs are likely to be), I wouldn't even have to bother separating the DRM code and the decoder into separate processes either.
Maybe you need to watch it on an iPhone. :)
When I play it on mine, full screen, it plays as smooth as it does on my MacPro V8.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Unlike on Windows 7 and Mac OS X, licensed H.264 decoders are not "available on the system" for users of Windows XP or Linux. Besides, just because a home desktop operating system comes with a licensed decoder doesn't mean a server operating system comes with a licensed encoder.
So of course Flash will do some things better. HTML5 will come along very quickly, however, because of the number of people (consumers and companies) that hate Flash. Adobe dug this hole for themselves with their arrogant attitudes and sky-high pricing. Now that the rest of the industry has an alternative to rally around, it will soon be a new world. It won't be flash-free, but Adobe will have to clean up it's act to compete.
Having a platform based/built on open standards is way more important than having some monetarily driven format underpinning everything we develop for. I don't care about efficiency; I care about being able to use the internet without having it dictated to me that I need to use a Mac, or Vista, or a special browser feature some asshat wrote that I need for my banking. The world doesn't need another microsoft. The world doesn't need another swiss-cheese plugin controlling the web so shaddap about it already.
Even if HTML5 "efficiency" sucks now, give it 6 months; it will improve. Open source evolves into a superior product because of the ability to innovate with legal freedom.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The performance of an implementation should have no baring on a standard at all. You can implement the video tag on IE 6 with Flash and a tiny bit of JavaScript or XSLT. This entire test makes about as much sense as deciding whether .mkv or .mov is a better container format by measuring H.264 playback performance with VLC and QuickTime.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Playing the video on my MacBook Pro resulting in Safari going from 5% of CPU to 20%. Clearly, YMMV.
The Engadget stub article states that Adobe is "cut out of the loop" of GPU acceleration on the Mac platform, and as evidence links to three other articles (also Engadget):
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/adobe-on-flash-and-the-ipad-apple-is-continuing-to-impose-rest/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/29/adobe-ups-passive-aggressive-stance-on-ipad-while-apple-promo-f/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/10/adobe-got-7-million-iphone-and-ipod-touch-download-requests-for/
All of which seem to detail the battle to get Flash on Apple's mobiles, and not a battle for GPU acceleration on MacOS. It would seem to me that if Flash isn't GPU accelerated on MacOS now, that they could take advantage of OpenGL to do so.
Wow, there's something badly wrong with your system then. I ran he video, and my browser went from using 10-20% of one core (other stuff in background tabs) to using 30-50%, in both in-frame and full-window mode. This is on a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo.
And I'm not sure why you think HTML 5 can't use the GPU. Flash - obviously - can't do anything the browser can't, so if Flash can use the GPU then so can the browser.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Assuming you were using firefox (since you are running XP), it will send a theora video which more than likely wont be hardware accelerated. Some H.264 videos will get hardware acceleration if you get a card that supports it. Even some integrated video chips support hardware acceleration for H.264. Once what ever video format gets more momentum and gets hardware acceleration you'll notice how low the cpu an go with it. This is great news for smartphones and other battery (and not very fast cpu) devices as the hardware acceleration would allow for both smoother operation and a lower power consumption.
I wonder why there isn't a Caveat Emptor stating the blog post is written by Adobe's Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform ?
--
Did I really say that?
Did I just say that??
an abstraction layer for access to gpu hardware? if only there were such a thing on mac os x...
Didn't Apple invent OpenCL?
He's using a Sempron. It probably has only one core, and less clockspeed than your processor, so it is little surprising someone that takes 50% on your machine will go 100% on his.
Jan has a lot of worthwhile detail and commenting in his article: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html
No 64-bit Firefox builds. No 64-bit Opera builds either.
There is the 64-bit build of Internet Explorer, but honestly.. all the 64-bit OS's I know of support 32-bit binaries, and what reason is there for a browser to have access to more than 2/4 gigs of memory? Is it because some of them leak memory so badly?
"His name was James Damore."
.
A report purporting to vindicate the performance of Adobes Flash plugin in comparison to open standards broke through the weak editorial barriers of the tech community yesterday. Its wrong, heres why. .
The report was created by Jan Ozer, a proponent of Flash who makes his living selling books and seminars about Adobes technologies. The original article is even interrupted by an advertisement promoting Ozers Streaming Production and Flash Delivery Workshop.
After noting Ozers bias, one site commenting on it wrote, we dont think that [his bias] has any effect on the test outcomes [his report presented].
The problem wasnt that Ozer faked data to promote Flash; some of his findings actually indicate that even the early beta implementations of HTML5 beat the latest version of Flash in video playback tests. The real issue is that Ozer framed the debate around an absurd premise to shift the conversation from real issues to contrived garbage.
A press release of fake science
Coverage of Ozers press release uncritically reported his findings that certain browsers were no better (or at least not much better) at rendering video from YouTube via Googles experimental HTML5/H.264 site than via the standard Flash version of YouTube.
Ozer detailed only the reported CPU Utilization for his test Mac running Safari, Chrome, and Firefox browsers, and a PC running the same three browsers in addition to Internet Explorer. He compared the performance of Flash 10 with the latest Flash 10.1, and contrasted HTML5 playback on browsers that supported that as an alternative to Flash, not too subtly suggesting that HTML5 and H.264 were riddled with problems that inspire fear, uncertainty and doubt, while Flash simply works everywhere.
However, his results made no comment on the visual quality of Googles Flash vs raw H.264 implementations. Previous tests I performed indicate that Googles beta version of YouTube running HTML5 delivers raw H.264 video with remarkably better picture equality compared to the HD version of its Flash video for the same file. You can see for yourself by viewing anything on YouTube in HD quality via both Flash and HTML5.
Additionally, Ozer seemed to gloss over the fact that his tests really say next to nothing about the efficiency and performance of the Flash runtime compared to the use of open standards, because he wasnt testing Flash content rendering, but really only the playback of video data delivered via a Flash wrapper.
To deliver video, Flash really isnt doing anything special. Thats why browsers supporting HTML5 can do this themselves without needing something like Flash (or its doppelgänger, Microsofts Silverlight).
HTML5 savvy browsers like Safari and Chrome can also animate content and even (with a little more work) do the kinds of fancy interactive apps and games that Flash was originally targeted toward, all using open web specifications....
And your assessment is based on what, voodoo? How do you know about the future? And not even the present and post even if they would be a good predictors of the future don't point to that, the fastest browser is a closed source browser (Opera) and Linux has not doubled its speed every 18 months. So, where do you get that from?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Efficiency isn't everything.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
and instead, you want the video plugin baked in to the browser?
How exactly is that different?
P.S. ActiveX isn't a browser plugin, but rather MS's bug-riddled implementation of a plugin host, having dumped support for Netscape-style plugins in IE4.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The OS should be playing back video.
Or are you telling me that those browsers have their own built-in image decoders? Their own font files? Their own font renderers? Their own GUI renderers? Their own mouse drivers? Etc, etc.
It's the job of the OS to control the computer and display data. The web browser's job is to know which calls to make to the OS to display the web content.
FTA, the author conducted his 'tests' on a Mac Pro with a two Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 3 GHz processors (8 cores), with 12 MB L2 Cache, 8GB RAM. Needless to say, this is not the average user's computer, and any differences in performance between flash on Windows on Mac will become less obvious due to the sheer computational power available. The tests would be more convincing if they were run on lesser hardware such as a Mac mini, where the differences in performance are far more noticeable (typing this on a Mac mini), so I dispute one of the main conclusions in the article: 'From these tests, Flash content does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows.'
Comparing Version 1 of one product with version 10 of another?
It's comforting to see that /. can still get sucked in by a well-crafted strawman.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Flash has been out since 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player) and the HTML5 specs started in 2004!
while HTML5 did come out ahead in many respects, it wasn't exactly a clear winner.
Furthermore, the study finds find that gasoline isn't always as fast as motorcycles.
HTML5 is a standard with multiple implementations, none being particularly mature as it's not a finalized standard yet. Flash is a specific implementation of one technology from one vendor. They're just not the same class of object and you can't directly compare them.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292 list some missing feature a html5 :
- buffering control
- signalling back to server
- Quality of implementations
Wow, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Kinda missed the word netbox there, didn't ya? Netboxes are by their very definition not as powerful (or as energy sucking) as a Core2Duo. My Sempron (which I am typing this on which is great for web surfing and Youtube) is actually a little more powerful than your average Atom, since Atom is an in order CPU, so if it redlines mine and makes a slideshow you can give it up working worth a damn on all those netbooks being sold today.
You also seem to have missed that without any hardware acceleration SD video on H.264 flash is smooth even full screen, while this video even in a teeny tiny window was a stuttering mess. And since to be truly "free" and not be just another patent encumbered format like flash it will have to be HTML5+Theora, which has zero hardware acceleration, while H.264 already has hardware acceleration out for just about every kind of device, including this 4 year old netbox if I want to shell out $60 for a 4350AGP card, I just don't see HTML5 doing much.
For most folks Flash works, and that is all they care about. As long as I can watch video without having to fire up my quad I'm happy, as the whole argument over patents doesn't affect me. But if we have to toss every single core on the planet, as well as every netbook and netbox that didn't come with ION, just to watch video in HTML5 I am sensing a serious fail here. ATM flash just works better on older hardware than HTML5, at least from what I'm seeing.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Strange comparison. Last Toms Hardware browser competition showed that Opera beats all other browsers when it comes to Flash. I regret the author doesn't touch Opera here (or did I overlooked that ?) Anyway it seems to me that Chrome HTML5 support is likely to be improved soon.
HTML5 = non-proprietary.
Flash = proprietary.
HTML5 > Flash.
Why are you booing Apple for that? Apple's machines support GPU decoding, and Safari's support for HTML5 in fact uses the GPU. If Adobe hasn't written a plugin for Apple machines yet, I fail to see how that's boo on Apple.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Indeed. Publicly available 64bit Adobe Flash Beta isn't available by default in the Ubuntu repositories since god knows when... Oh wait... it is publicly available...
Here be signatures
Microsoft's definition of 64bit != true 64bit. In fact it is more like 32bit.
Want to know more? Google the citation for yourself...
Here be signatures
I've not heard the term 'netbox' before and Google doesn't show anything that seems to match your definition. On my machine, that video was using 10-30% of one core of a 2.16GHz C2D. The fact that there is another core is irrelevant. A machine half the clock speed with one core would be using 20-60% of its speed. An in-order Atom might come closer to 100%.
You also seem to be comparing SD flash to 720p H.264. It's not surprising that playing back SD content would take less CPU power than playing back HD content, even 720p. Full screen vs in window is misleading. The same amount of CPU time is needed for the decoding. Only the scaling is different, and even a cheap graphics card from a decade ago will do the scaling in hardware. If anything, playback in a window is more difficult, because you need to keep updating all of the other things on screen.
A lot of SD flash content, by the way, is not H.264, it's On2 VP6 or Sorenson Spark, which are similar quality to Theora. Theora delivered using the video tag uses a lot less CPU power than SD Flash content.
Flash uses more CPU than any other player I've seen. On my old 1.5GHz PowerBook G4, both VLC and QuickTime can play back 720p, while Flash can only just handle SD iPlayer content. My 1.2GHz Celeron M ThinkPad sees the same thing - VLC uses about half as much CPU time as Flash for the same videos.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, in this case since it's just software patents it's not technically forever, it's "only" 20 years.
For reference though, Windows 3.1 turns 18 this month ;)
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
obligatory XKCD on the subject of flash, computers, and whatnot: http://www.xkcd.com/676/
No doubt you were modded off topic for choosing the wrong xkcd. http://xkcd.com/619/ It's happened to all of us at one time or another.
It’s like comparing your 10th generation of a sports car, that got optimized for decades, against a brand-new experimental car.
Of course the old one will win! But that says nothing about how it will be, when the new one got the same amount of optimization.
But what is important, is that the new car offers so many new freedoms, that it’s worth it, even if it were much slower.
In this case, the seamless embedding of videos, and the native playback alone, are two killer points that you can never ever achieve with Flash. Or can Flash do this: http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yeah but what do you do about the patent issues surrounding H.264?
Nothing. As usual, it will be mainly a headache for Linux users; most others will either have it available on their OS or browser out of the box, or would be able to download it (I suspect Google might put up a free download of H.264 codec for XP, for example).
Servers are more interesting, and I guess it means that people will have to pay up eventually.
Just run the tests yourself instead of speculating.
I was merely pointing out the hilarity of yammering about performance hit on machines that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers used to go to the moon.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
it's not just about performance.
there's one huge difference between HTML5 video and Flash.
a video file is just inert data. it doesn't *DO* anything.
Flash is a program. it could do *anything*. flash has been used and abused for years to spy on users.
personally, i wouldn't care even if flash was 1000 times faster than HTML5 video. I don't want random websites executing arbitrary code on MY computer, just because i happened to visit them.
in fact, i don't even want video files to start playing on a web page just because it's open in my browser. I want nothing except a still image until i click on it. and i want it to stop playing when i tell it to.
BTW, the article smells like astro-turfing from Adode...especially since it takes at face value Adobe's whinge about "being cut out of the loop" on the Mac. if they weren't too lazy to program it, they could have accelerated video on the mac (and on linux) if they wanted to.
Um what? Maybe you can specify what you mean a little further.
(And for the record, I have a program and input that will hit 31 1/2 GB of memory use on a 32 GB system running XP 64-bit, so this is my way of calling BS.)
*EVERYTHING* might be submarine patented.
But here's the thing: Unlike copyrights and trademarks, patents expire. W3C could recommend MPEG-1 video with MP2 audio, which is far worse than H.264+AAC and Theora+Vorbis bit for bit but is old enough (1991) that two crowd-sourced patent searches were unable to turn up any unexpired U.S. patents (source).
People who distribute software for a fee or who sell services related to software have to sound like Ned Flanders in order not to be accused of inducing infringement. MPAA v. Grokster.
I tried it too. It plays great in Chrome.
But Firefox is another story. It plays great until I maximize it - then it stutters like crazy, on my 3.5ghz Phenom II X4.
720p? Why is it in a dinky little box, then?
That said, I love the UI. Very professional looking.
Also, I figured I'd toss this link out for comparison/interest: http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
Flash is a program. it could do *anything*.
So is JavaScript embedded in HTML.
Quick! We need an open source alternative!
As for my definition of netbox, it is actually pretty simple. Any box that uses very little power, and is so quiet you don't realize it is on, and cranks out almost no heat, is to me a netbox. you're not gonna edit video on it, or transcode, or game, but for basic web surfing, downloading, and Youtube, it is really great. Instead of blowing cash on some Atom I just bought this "Best Buy Vista Special" off a client for $50 off a quad, slapped a license for XP Home on it, and used this circa 2006 Compaq Sempron to replace the 1.1Ghz Celeron that was my previous netbox. BTW the 1.1GHz Celeron actually played SD flash just fine, as long as I didn't try to do anything else like download. This 1.8GHz Sempron plays SD flash fine while multi-tasking.
And where did I say HD H.264? I'm pretty sure I said SD, and from looking at Media Info (which comes with K-Lite Mega Codec, which I highly recommend) nearly every video I've bothered to download from Youtube and other video sites the past few days are H.264, with one each of H.263 and VP6. And the point was I can watch the SD Flash full screen nicely, the HTML5 link the GP posted couldn't do anything but skip even with a tiny window.
And in the old days I would have agreed about flash, but since flash 9 I haven't had any problems with it. But I heard flash for Mac sucks ass, so maybe that is where your trouble is at. I haven't played with flash on Linux, but it wouldn't surprise me if Adobe put out a truly shitty version there too. But on XP and Windows 7 (I avoid Vista like the clap) ever since flash 9 came out it has been smooth sailing, at least for me. Sure it can be a hog based on content, but I haven't had it be a stuttering mess like that HTML5 video was. Maybe in the future they'll get it better, wouldn't surprise me if they did, but right now I can play flash, while HTML5 is just a slideshow.
And if it is a slideshow on this Sempron you can bet it would be truly torture on one of those non ION equipped netbooks that seem to be so popular lately. Glad it works for you, but for me? I'll stick with flash, thanks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Clearly there's a slight imbalance in comparing a very mature technology to one that doesn't even have finalised specifications yet, forget implementation. And even now HTML5 beats out Flash on the level playing field (no h/w acceleration on the mac).
Oh come on. You can do better than that. "I hope they find it quickly. Maybe it rolled under the couch?" or "How do they intend to call it back, I wonder?". I'm sure there's a good boxer joke in there somewhere (loosening someone else's face).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
HTML5 could be 75% slower than Flash for all I care, if it meant I didn't have to install tons of Adobe crapware onto my PC just to view web video.
I know that you are wrong. Google the citation yourself.
"His name was James Damore."
gollum123 also links to additional tests indicating that Flash "[1]does
not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows."
Well, guess what. Flash DOES perform consistently worse on Linux. Videos show immense tearing. Add some hardware acceleration and optimizations to the still very new HTML5 technology and it will beat out Flash no problem, I'd say.
I am not devoid of humor.
What the hell do you mean by "the Americans"? Don't you know to treat people as individuals yet?
I am not devoid of humor.
I have came to know this by reading through some of the Wine documentation. So no; I'm not wrong.
And you know why? Take a look at WoW64. Any idea as to why you can run 64bit apps on 32bit Windows? Because the 64bit Microsoft version (E, E & E, thank you very much) is just 32bit with long long's.
Sooooo....
Here be signatures
Lol 32 doesn't mean that you can't utilize more than 4GB of RAM...
Windows 64bit is just 32bit but only with long long's and the ability to acces 64bit.
Howevah... by Googling the citation for it (and I couldn't find it at WineHQ, although it's there somewhere) I came to find out that starting with Win7 64bit is fully supported.
Here be signatures
You cannot run 64-bit apps on 32-bit windows.
Really.
A single citation of this being performed is all thats required.....
"His name was James Damore."
yes, so is javascript. that's why i use the NoScript plugin.
I don't want ANYONE running programs on my computer just because I happened to visit their web site. If I allow them to run anything (js, flash, whatever) then it will ONLY be after I have evaluated the site and the code (as much as i am able), and made a conscious, deliberate choice to enable scripting for that site.
Obviously, that is not a guarantee of perfect safety. But it's a hell of a lot safer than just blindly running everything that my browser encounters.
BTW, javascript isn't quite as bad as flash. there are more limitations on what js can do, and it's not compiled so the source is readable (although it might be obfuscated).
Windows 64bit is just 32bit but only with long long's and the ability to acces 64bit.
Howevah... by Googling the citation for it (and I couldn't find it at WineHQ, although it's there somewhere) I came to find out that starting with Win7 64bit is fully supported.
I still have no idea about what you're babbling about, and am still calling BS. There's nothing substantial that has changed re. 64-bit support from x64 XP to x64.
Take a look at WoW64. Any idea as to why you can run 64bit apps on 32bit Windows?
BS and FUD. WoW64 is the subsystem that runs 32-bit programs on 64-bit Windows, not the other way around.
Learn what you're talking about before you go spouting nonsense.
I would mod you up if I had any points. Simple, true and to the point. There really isn't anything more to it.
Well, perhaps apart from how different doing said calls would be on Linux, Windows, OSX, etc. I don't know, but if that's how it's done for images and fonts, I fail to see how video should be any different (if a tad more complex). My OS, and thus any software running inside it, can display png files. My OS has a build-in h.264 decoder, but even Chrome (the only h.264 capable browser I have installed) is doing a rather shitty job at rendering said video format. It runs smoothly, but it uses far more resources than seems justifiable to do so.