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Flash Comes To the iPad Via RipCode
suraj.sun writes "Texas-based company RipCode has announced a new 'clientless Flash video codec' that will allow Flash content to be streamed on Apple's iPad. This would include sites like Hulu and YouTube, assuming the respective companies don't find a way to block it. According to RipCode's press release, the TransAct Transcoder V6 captures the iPad's request for Flash content and converts it into a special format that the device accepts and plays. This is all done without a local client or user intervention. 'RipCode's Transactional Transcoding platform enables an alternate and immediate solution to this issue, opening up video content to users without requiring the content hoster to move to HTML5 or pre-transcode entire video libraries from Flash to an iPad-accepted container format. By transcoding the content "in the cloud," it is essentially analogous to a network-based Flash to MP4 or MPEG-TS video adaption layer.'"
Killing flash.
Thus, I'll expect they'll patch in a way to detect and block this ASAP.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Webcam usb uvc flash support and the ipad can transmit to the world.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
How secure is this method of streaming flash?
It'd be nice to run flash on another machine and save my machine from the vulnerability risk.
Who cares really? Even macworld says the iPhad is crap.
This could actually hasten the demise of flash (assuming that's actually going to happen at all...), if the format it transcodes into is universally playable.
On the fly transcoding every time a piece of content is accessed seems is a fairly excessive load on the server, so presumably the videos are either pre-transcoded en masse or transcoded on demand and then cached for future access.
In either case, the content provider is left with a pile of flash videos and a separate pile of videos in this new format (site seems to be down, so I can't check what that actually is). If the mystery format is, in fact, playable on non-Apple devices there's no real reason for them to keep hold of the flash versions - why serve two copies if the iPad version does fine for PCs as well?
Video games, whores, web conferencing, etc.
Yay. 'twould seem that a lot of effort goes, lately, into killing Flash - or at least into thwarting its ever wider spread. A good thing ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
It does.
From what I understand, this reads flash videos without using flash code. There is a difference between flash code and flash codec. One is an insecure runtime that is a blatant hole inside a device's security and allows arbitrary code execution, the other is just a regular video codec that VLC can read.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
as well as awe inspiring & even frightening to many. coming soon to a stratosphere near you. no gadgets required.
never a better time to consult with/trust in your creators, the ultimate in genuine power & control since/until forever. see you there?
"This would include sites like Hulu and YouTube, assuming the respective companies don't find a way to block it."
The iPad already supports YouTube via a native application, and YouTube also supports HTML5.
And Hulu are writing an iPad app.
This only supports flash video as well, not all of the flash games out there. So flash hasn't come to the iPad, unlike the headline.
This could actually hasten the demise of flash (assuming that's actually going to happen at all...)
Just like the iPad is already changing the face of the Internet(assuming that's actually going to happen at all...)
I'm all for the demise of Flash. It is a necessary evil but let's get rid of it. This could be one way. HTML5 may or may not be the way to go, that is yet to be seen. However this is the open web people. Do we not have enough technology to build something on the web that will do what Flash does and maybe even run Flash content? With this and Gordon it seems we are getting there. The primary roadblock in my opinion will be security issues and accessing the local computer's hard drive. Aside from that anything done in Flash can now be done with current web technologies.
Apparently CPU power for transcoding Flash and bandwidth for streaming the result are both free, if the cloud is involved. What's in it for them?
I don't understand why people mix up Flash and Flash video all the time. The latter is a small subset of the former. Can you really not conceptually tell the difference between a video playing at youtube and the content at http://www.homestarrunner.com/ ?
Flash can play H264, iPad can play H264, iPhone can play H264. No transcoding needed.
So, looks like someone in RipCompany's PR team has jumped the gun on the iPad/Flash news without thinking this through.
You mean assuming Apple doesn't block it.
Why? All it does is remove any incentive for ad agencies to switch to HTML 5. Again, you need to think bigger than flash video, for the most part digital ad agencies practically breathe flash and very often develop simultaneous desktop/web deployed applications with it (Zinc, AIR).
No, Ben Long doesn't like it. Not what you said
Watch those corners
Your asking common folks to differ between pretty colours on youtube from pretty colours in another website?
Given that most flash videos are actually mpeg 4 or h264, but wrapped up, it probably wouldn't put major load on a server to "transcode" on the fly –all they need to do is recontain the video.
Although Apple's (The Steve's) plans are patently capitalistic and really have nothing to do with pushing standards unless they benefit Apple directly, I'd not shed a TEAR if flash went away. It's really hard to boo hoo for Adobe.
Yeah, but using Flash for other things than video isn't as widely used anymore. Have a look at, say, Alexa's list of top 500 websites, http://www.alexa.com/topsites , most of those only use Flash as a means to deliver video.
Such websites typically do not work with the limited Flash implementations which are available on non-iPhone smartphones.
I don't get it, how does it "transcode" the VIDEO PLAYER? The main reason Youtube doesn't deliver all video through the tag is that some videos require overlays (e.g. for subtitles, or ads). The main reason why Hulu delivers video through Flash is (I think) DRM. How do they work around this? It's not about the video stream they need the video player itself (which is written in Flash) - so the only viable solution would be something like what Opera Mini does... but they don't seem to say they are doing this.
Flash - was killed, because it was bad for your Monitor. Or Anti-Monitor.
Golden Age - Somewhat archaic, but did have protective helmet layer.
Kid Flash - Replaced original Flash.
Reverse Flash - aka Professor Zoom. Jobs' alter ego.
Impulse (Bart) - Apparently only useful vs Superboy Prime.
Tornado Twins - um.... no one remembers them.
Lord Savitar - Lord of Speed.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
So it's good for YouTube and Hulu... what about the other 99% of applications Flash is used for? i.e. interactive content? What about flash gaming? Annoying flash websites? My wife is pissed because her favorite games won't play on the iPad I just ordered...
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
According to RipCode's press release, the TransAct Transcoder V6 captures the iPad's request for Flash content and converts it into a special format that the device accepts and plays. This is all done without a local client or user intervention.
So does this mean that they act as a proxy that you run all your web requests through? And if a site happens to contain Flash video, they'll re-encode it (well, re-container it) on the fly to an HTML 5 compliant video stream? If so, no thanks.
One is an insecure runtime that is a blatant hole inside a device's security and allows arbitrary code execution...
Wait... why don't you tell us what you really think?
Yeah I thought they were gonna talk about this: http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/
Flash's demise will have nothing to do with something as inconsequential as RipCode. Let's be clear on what RipCode is: a Flash video replacement. What it isn't: Flash.
You know all those websites created in Flash, with Flash menus and Flash fonts, etc? You know, the ones with something called ActionScript going on deep down where you interact with the website... well, Ripcode doesn't even begin to replace them, it only replaces Flash video.
Now, RipCode may provide a stop-gap solution for displaying video until HTML5 fully arrives, but a Flash replacement it ain't. A strange (on-demand video re-encoding at the server??) temporary solution that will be obsolete in a year, it is.
I was actually hoping it could handle non-interactive flash animations as well. The site is down so I can't tell anything. But that seems like the only useful product here: if this is for video only, why don't website producers just encode these videos in h.264 (+Theora?) and then use HTML5 <video> with a flash player fallback? It's really not that hard. I guess this could be useful as a stopgap until use of the old non-h.264 flash codec is cleared out. *shrug*
Actually, what would be smart is if the mobile Safari scanned the list of parameters being sent to a flash plugin request, try each as a URL and if it gets an video header just start playing the video natively, i.e. HTML5 style, without actually using the plugin...
For a substantial percentage of "flash videos" I would suspect that no real re-encoding is necessary. Ever since Flash 9.something, the Adobe flash player has been able to decode h.264. A fair few "flash based" streaming sites took them up on that pretty quickly. The .swf blob just provides some widgets for playback/volume/time slider, and pulls the video from some URL(usually found in the page source, sometimes obfuscated a bit). Even before 9.something, the prior .flv format, while not as standard s h.264, is publicly understood and playable(just as VLC). In all these cases, and they cover a large area, the only real challenge is working past the weak obfuscation, if any, to find the actual source URL for the video, which is already in a workable format, and just grabbing it. For individual video capturing use, "View source" and a couple minutes of thinking is usually sufficient, with Wireshark and a filter looking for HTTP GET requests waiting in the wings if that doesn't work. If you want to release a product, though, it has to work automatically, preferably without you dedicating employees to manually building per-site rulesets that the app has to pull down on a daily basis. That could be a bit tricky, so it would be interesting to see how they do it.
.swf and a .mp4 from any commodity webserver is way cheaper than using Adobe's "secure streaming solutions" and, if you are one of the hundreds of more-or-less-youtube-clones out there, expensive software is a greater threat to your solvency than a few people downloading and watching video offline.
.flv) as a container format, it
Adobe does offer some slightly more sophisticated and DRM-y streaming delivery methods, for those delivering their precious "premium content" via flash(and I have no idea what the RipCode guys are planning to do about that, since, even if solving that one is technologically trivial, it is almost certainly DMCA-violating). Most of the guys in the cheap seats don't bother, since just serving a
The case that would be technologically tricky(but which is becoming increasingly uncommon) is what people used to mean when they said "flash video", which was a script-driven vector-with-occasional-bitmap-bit-and-a-soundtrack flash object, rather than just lossy compressed video that happened to be played by flash. For the ones that are purely non-interactive, you could basically just do a screen capture, and compress the result into a standard video format; but you'd have to do some sort of fairly clever algorithmic parsing to deal with the ones that were mostly just animation; but had some limited interactivity(even if it was just a start/stop/mute button).
The second main question, aside from "how are they going to process the flash?" is "How is it 'clientless'?". Even when dealing with the most trivial case(.swf player object being used as an embedded player for an h.264 video whose URL is clearly evident in the page source), their software is going to have to get a word in, to rewrite the page, removing the EMBED and replacing it with an HTML5 VIDEO widget with the appropriate video URL. There is Absolutely No Way that Apple is going to approve some sort of plugin for mobile Safari. Is their plan to have people browse through a basic proxy page, controlled by them, that does the rewriting(and a little analytics and spying on the side, just to pay the bills?), or are they going to have an App that uses Safari for page rendering, with their own mogrification sauce for the flash bits?
Press release is slashdotted right now, so I can't get details; but I'm not terribly optimistic for this outfit(unless they have some brilliant insight into the problem that isn't evident from TFS). Pretty much all the sites where automated transformation of flash blobs to iPod-accepted video would be a simple problem will probably make the change themselves in the fairly near future. If you are already using h.264(or even
I'm getting tired of all these stupid "Flash on iphone" articles. For ****'s sake people, if you want flash on your cell phone, buy a phone that supports flash. Buy a phone where you can install anything you like. Why is this so hard?
Sure. Using flash doesn't get used for the majority of content these days. Except for one thing. It does get used to deliver the majority of paying advertisements (besides Google links).
This one person doesn't speak for MacWorld. He is a contributor (right up there with blogger). If you actually read the piece, he obviously dislikes the small screen. He reiterates that point many times in many different ways, meaning he won't be satisfied with any small screen for regular day to day use. The article is more of a piece about the wasted time trying to do real 'work' on a small screen than a statement about the iPad itself.
As to the article summary, they should realize that YouTube already pushes H.264 to Apple mobile devices.
Can you really not conceptually tell the difference between a video playing at youtube and the content at http://www.homestarrunner.com/ ?
With NoScript installed, they do look pretty much the same ;}
Neither work without the Flash plugin for your browser as well.
To any normal person, that means they are the exact same thing.
Granted though, a slashdotter getting confused is a tad odd and worthy of mocking.
Also, the Flash "studio" tool, used to create Flash, will probably be around for a while. They'll update it to output HTML5 and designers will continue to use it.
While this is pretty much horseshit as far as 'replacing flash' goes, it does make me think about an interesting solution to the whole iDevice/Flash kerfuffle. Basically you could theoretically create a thin client proxy that interacted with the flash running on a remote server, sort of in the same way that VNC or RDP works. Maybe allow transparency and javascript interactions...but not executing Actionscript on the client, just passing an receiving messages. Maybe like X11. Could be interesting. Obviously would depend on performance (again).
That is if you aren't a Newgrounds user.
Why I play Flash games:
-they work in Linux ...), because it's simply something in a browser, not somthing that takes over your entire PC
-they're free (granted, some aren't)
-there are MANY of them and some are really really good (the gemcraft zero series for example)
-despite lesser graphics, you get an as fun gameplay experience as many modern 100-million costing games
-some are addicting, with features like earning medals, upgrades, etc...
-they load fast
-you can play them while doing other things (waiting for a compile,
Playing Flash games from NG or other sites on any phone would be soooo nice. The only problem would be the controls. Flash games are usually made for mouse and specific keyboard keys and I can't imagine playing them in an efficient way on a small touch screen without keyboard shortcuts.
No, I cannot, since both require Flash to be installed, and both present interactive graphical elements through which you have to interact to get at the site's content.
Is it really fair to call it a laptop? I mean with a laptop you can install whatever software you might want.
This is more like a Tablet FucksYourFreedomInTheAss (FYFITA). The new Apple iFyfita, because it has what consumers crave.
And fonts are so 1990. Most of us are so over being wowed by the fact that a site has 10 fonts that should have never been allowed to be on the same page.
About the only two things that most people see as useful flash is watch movies and, maybe, google finance and the like. For kids the flash games are important. Most users would be perfectly happy with the former in a non-flash wrapper, since the only reason it is to provide some primitive form of DRM.
But, really, without the movies flash could go away and many would never notice. Except, of course, for the ad agencies.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Yes, but how does this help me play my flash based games!!
If you don't already own a Kindle and an iPhone, iTouch, Droid or Nexus One, the iPad is cool and you should get it.
You a far cheaper netbook...
You know all those websites created in Flash, with Flash menus and Flash fonts, etc? You know, the ones with something called ActionScript going on deep down where you interact with the website...
Yeah, you know, the websites that cause me to reflexively hit the "close window" button on my browser...
This merely unshackles video from the prison of proprietary Flash Video format, and converts the video into a real standard. Hooray for that.
This does not bring "Flash" to the iPad. This does not even bring Flash Mobile Profile to the iPad.
This is not a way to get around Apple's ban on a Flash interpreter on the system.
The headline is *awful* and completely incorrect.
Please... let's NOT confuse "Flash encoded video" with Flash itself.
Doing so only HELPS Adobe and Flash, because it furthers the misconception that Flash made web video "possible" (or even "better").
Things were much better when Quicktime was the web standard (presuming we're not comparing yesterday's codecs to todays of course).
Video is meant to be processed natively and with hardware support.
This is just a Flash video web transcoder... which is in itself a good thing, but it would be nice if the editors here actually *edited* corrections when needed.
Apple just approved the Opera Mini browser. Opera could add this plugin, and gain a big marketshare of the iProduct's browsers.
> You know all those websites created in Flash, with Flash menus
> and Flash fonts, etc? You know, the ones with something called
> ActionScript going on deep down where you interact with the website.
No, actually, I don't know them. It's been years since I saw a use of Flash that wasn't either Yet Another YouTube Clone, or a chintzy game along the lines of Farmville or Zuma.
People who play Farmville and so forth are, as a rule, either several decades too old to be part of the target market for the iPad, or several years too young to have their own computing device (other than a phone; even preschool kids are running around with their own phones). Young people who are old enough to have their own computing device mostly use installed games that don't require Flash, or consoles, or else they don't play computer games because they're too busy updating their MySpace relationship status.
As far as the iPad is concerned, that leaves YouTube and things like it.
(Not that I think RipCode is particularly relevant. If it's not installed out of the box, people are going to year that "YouTube doesn't work on the iPad", and either they'll care about that or they won't. If YouTube is a big deal to them, they won't buy the device, and if it's not, then they won't need RipCode.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It is almost like they're trying to do things the hard way. Just develop real applications.
Because for the most part, Flash is used for video. If it wasn't for sites like YouTube, Flash would be 99% used for crap (ads and the like) and 1% used for useful materials (like homestarrunner). But because YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and the like have Flash Video, it skews the usefulness of Flash upwards. I'm sure the reason people complained about the lack of Flash on the iPhone was not "I need my HSR!" but "I need my YouTube!".
Most people will probably be happy with their video sites working and "not supporting" the rest of Flash.
I've used full mobile flash before, and it's awful. All those flash ads suddenly appear and now your webpage takes forever to render because that ad consumes all the CPU cycles. Scrolling beocmes herky-jerky and random as lack of CPU means your scroll tap takes longer to process (and you probably already tapped several times by then). If your device supports native playback of flash video, then a FLV ad causes the player to start up and you to watch the first second or two of the ad as it pops open the player while you try to cancel out so you can see your web page. If not, then you go to places like YouTube and see dropped frames on the low-quality streams. Or, brilliantly, I went to see a video that locked up the device so badly, the easiest way to get out was to remove the battery (it wasn't hung - it played a few frames every 30 seconds or so, and a second of audio around the same time - a strange codec was used that consumed crapload of CPU cycles leaving none for the OS).
Flash sucks, let it die. For video you already have formats that are available cross platform and without the menagerie of security problems built into the design.
Targeted advertising epic fail.
Flash's greatest strength, vector graphics, is the least used feature. Why? It is difficult and time consuming to create realistic looking animations using pure vector, compared to raster. Instead or sending compact graphic commands, its used to simply serve up bandwidth hogging finished video and audio, what a waste.
You just have to use the VNC client and connect to your favorite machine. You can also run all the native windows applications and such. The ipad is a great remote display and interaction device.. it doesn't need to run flash natively.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
The only thing this "clientless Flash video codec" does is remux the FLV video into a Quicktime or MPEG container. It's like taking an HTML page, adding an XML doctype to the top and calling it an "HTML to XML gateway". Yeah ok, not rocket science.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Excellent comment. I've tried as many SWF converters as I can find on Google, and they are all a mess when trying to output anything but the most basic SWF to video. Most just play back the SWF and then try and run a screen recording process. However, it might be interesting to upload a SWF to Youtube and see what happens- last time I checked they rejected it outright. I don't know if that has changed though.
I use tinyogg for my youtube watching unless I'm in a hurry. What they do is get a youtube URL from you, transcode the video into theora and cache it for a fixed period. Much better service than just recontaining, although you have to wait in a queue.
If by "changing the face of the internet" you mean "can only view web sites that use no Flash at all" then I think you have nailed it right on the head.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I just download the .flv/.mp4 source with a service like ClipNabber, (you can also do it manually or find installable apps that can de-obfuscate the source location for you) then play the file directly with VLC or Mplayer (since those are the only two video players I use on any device, I don't worry about converting).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
(Not that I think RipCode is particularly relevant. If it's not installed out of the box, people are going to year that "YouTube doesn't work on the iPad", and either they'll care about that or they won't. If YouTube is a big deal to them, they won't buy the device, and if it's not, then they won't need RipCode.)
Except YouTube does work on the iPad (and iPhone).
This is a total crock. The size of the screen is a very minor complaint for what he talks about. He spent a great deal of time trying to just absorb media on the damn thing, and he discovered constantly that the screen was too glossy to watch video and too bright to read books on. It's a pain in the ass to browse the web because you still have to pinch-zoom in order to get to any links. And that's in addition to how useless it is for doing work. Apple considered the possibility of doing work on the iPad to be enough of a market to port iWork over to it, so don't dismiss its shortcomings there, either.
What Ben Long discovered is that the iPad is useless for anything other than prostrating yourself in front of Steve Jobs, and it's not because of the screen size. The iPad succeeds at being a gigantic iPhone, and nothing else.
In all these cases, and they cover a large area, the only real challenge is working past the weak obfuscation, if any, to find the actual source URL for the video, which is already in a workable format, and just grabbing it. For individual video capturing use, "View source" and a couple minutes of thinking is usually sufficient, with Wireshark and a filter looking for HTTP GET requests waiting in the wings if that doesn't work.
Wireshark? More like Firefox with one of several user-friendly addons. Flash needs to talk to the browser to fetch the video. At that point it's fairly easy to capture the request (and most decent addons don't even need to do that often because they already know how to deobfuscate many sites' content links).
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Yes, I recommend this to the GP:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/editing-your-comment-spam-for-optimal-porn-delivery
Following these guidelines, a better way to phrase this spam comment might be:
Hey guys, you know when you're walking around with your wearable computer, but there's always some leftover stuff like dongles and battery packs that you don't have a fanny pack for, and you just end up cramming them into your pockets, often resulting in torn pocket protectors? Well I'm selling replica handbags that can allow you to carry these accessories around in style, so cheap even a game developer can afford them! Just go to ivyreplica.com and place an order! All our handbags are Linux-compatible and DRM-free!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The second main question, aside from "how are they going to process the flash?" is "How is it 'clientless'?". Even when dealing with the most trivial case(.swf player object being used as an embedded player for an h.264 video whose URL is clearly evident in the page source), their software is going to have to get a word in, to rewrite the page, removing the EMBED and replacing it with an HTML5 VIDEO widget with the appropriate video URL.
Well. The easiest way to do that would be to sell their service not to the end-users, but to the content-providers. "Got flash video content? Want iPhone users to see it? Don't have time to rebuild it as HTML5? Just use this JavaScript library instead of the embedding mechanism you normally use, and..."
It wouldn't let an end-user browse to an arbitrary flash site and see everything. It would let a flash site be browsed to by an arbitrary end-user. That's probably the better business angle anyway, in terms of which party is more willing to spend actual money for this capability. And this also lets them avoid looking bad, by simply not deploying their product for flash that their product doesn't work well with. I bet this is how they end up doing it.
I've used full mobile flash before, and it's awful. All those flash ads suddenly appear and now your webpage takes forever to render because that ad consumes all the CPU cycles. Scrolling beocmes herky-jerky and random as lack of CPU means your scroll tap takes longer to process (and you probably already tapped several times by then).
Full mobile Flash works fine on my N900, even with the stock browser loading every hellspawned flash-based ad in existence (mostly works OK in Iceweasel 3.5 too, although it's running an archaic version of Flash that can be troublesome). I'll admit it bogs down a bit when playing Youtube videos.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
All he discovered is he prefers a laptop. I would imagine some people feel the same about a laptop, a desktop, or a smartphone. To imply his experience will equate to the millions that will be sold is a bit farfetched.
Some of his statements are pedantic to the extreme. "Too much effort" to swipe a finger instead of hitting a spacebar?
"Too much effort to look down"? or somesuch nonsense?
The only thing I read into this, is that he disliked the idea of it before he even tried it, and lo and behold, he found what he expected to see. There is nothing wrong with this as everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. I just find it interesting that someone will place such value in someone else's personal tastes. The parent went so far as to proclaim that MacWorld itself hated the device, which is obviously not the case.
I love Apple products, but I have no use for an iPad. I have a smartphone and a laptop. I have no need for something in between. I dont' want one. Not for any flaw I might find in the device, but it simply doesn't fit my needs. Rather than buying it anyway and proclaiming it was awful knowing it doesn't fit my needs, I simply chose to pass it by. This contributor obviously didn't approach it in that fashion. It is a bit disingenuous to portray an open mind when from the very first sentences, he makes it very obvious he had an intense dislike of the screen size.
"It's just me, my iPad, and an actual usable device, my trusty 13-inch MacBook"
" As always, the page loaded quickly and looked great, for a smallish screen. Oh wait, I forgot, we don't compare the iPad screen to something reasonable like a 13-inch MacBook screen"
"Soon, though, the thrill of the Imax-like-by-comparison-to-the-iPhone screen was tempered by the hassle of trying to compare items on multiple Web pages."
"In addition to not being able to place pages side by side, switching between pages involves multiple taps, separated by a scan of a bunch of tiny thumbnails."
"But even this is a lot of work. A lot more work than merely pressing the spacebar every time I want to advance by a screenful. Instead, I have to swipe, and hope that the screen scrolls far enough, but not too far. "
"Fortunately, there's no TV in my current location, so I don't have to wonder why I would watch a tiny iPad screen instead of a TV."
Flash needs to talk to the browser to fetch the video.
What Flash? The story is about iPad not being able to run Flash.
Adobe rakes in metric fucktons of cash with their horrifically overpriced commercial software such as Photoshop, Premier and Connect, your company will be just fine.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As long as it lets me run ChatRoulette, I don't give a hoot about any distinction :-)
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Since the GGP was talking about downloading videos (and using Wireshark to make it possible) this subthread is obviously not about any device running iPhone OS. We're talking about capturing Flash video on a PC, which means that Firefox is very much available.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
It must be a little nerve wracking to build a business plan that depends on a third party continuing to behave terribly.
But then again, the third party is Apple, so perhaps they're safe.
Here's why I use Flash on the sites I build:
audio and video
Everything else (menus, non-web fonts, slideshows, and other eye candy) can be done, quickly and easily, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These technologies fail gracefully, are readable by search robots and blind people, and don't require a $700 IDE to edit.
So yes, there's a lot of sites which use Flash for user interface and Rich Internet Applications. But cross-platform video and audio playback has been the killer app for a lot of us, and we'll be quite happy to switch to HTML5 media just as soon as MSIE supports it.
(Which reminds me, when will Adobe join forces with Microsoft to cripple IE9?)
The trouble lies with the "flash videos" that are actually Flash, not just a video player implemented in flash pulling some external video. Something like Badger, Badger, Badger or the old "Terrible Secret of Space" that were popular back in the day, or any of the HomeStar Runner stuff, are examples of the sort of Flash content that is rather problematic. They are "videos" in the sense of "moving pictures, with sound"; but they are implemented as vector and/or bitmap objects controlled by Actionscript along with a sound file played back as a soundtrack.
.swf will not be fully automated(you have to click "start", or, as was popular back in the dialup days, there is a tiny .swf loader that does something to distract the viewer from their soul-crushing existence long enough for the actual "video" to load; but you wouldn't want recorded-in to a video conversion. Something like Homestar Runner, where the site navigation and the "video" to which you navigate are basically one and the same .swf object, are even more vexing. And "video" with some sort of actionscripted easter-eggs in it also presents problems.
.swf(since, for example, the loader stub animation was usually re-used between different animations by the same person or hosted on the same site, and could thus be identified and excluded), conversion with reasonable fidelity is possible; but it isn't elegant. You pretty much end up just doing a screen-capture of the Adobe .swf runtime executing the file, or end up with the garbage output of some 3rd party implementation that hasn't been updated in ages because people have mostly lost interest.
.swf to HTML5 is conceivable; but no such animal exists, to my knowledge.
There is, essentially, no elegant way to convert these. You either implement a substantial subset of the Flash Runtime(since much of this material is older, you often don't need full compatibility with the capabilities of the Flash 10.0.X or 10.X series), or you run them in Adobe's Flash, and use a screen-grabber to capture and compress the output into a video in the more typical sense.
For small scale, manual conversion, that isn't a big deal. A pain, but not a nightmare. The annoying thing is that, in some cases, the
With a touch of manual labor, or a per-site/per-animator examination of the actual
Games, of course, are completely immune to this method, since interactivity is essential. Since SVG+Canvas+Javascript is not, fundamentally, all that different, a programmatic converter directly from legacy
iMobileCinema has been doing this for a loooonnnng time for us jailbreakers. All it does is find the flv for the relative flash player and play it with the internal video app.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
I'm guessing this is a service they'll market to providers as an easy way to reach "flash-free" customers. So all the rewriting would be done before it reaches the browser.
Here's why I use Flash on the sites I build:
audio and video
And why don't you use HTML5, then? Or at least HTML5 which gracefully degrades to Flash?
we'll be quite happy to switch to HTML5 media just as soon as MSIE supports it.
It does.
We had a much better excuse -- I had a job developing a music widget, and the widget itself had to work on places like Myspace, which didn't allow iframes, only Flash. Even so, as long as we could, we kept it a fully HTML solution, using Flash only for the actual audio playback -- but HTML for everything you actually saw, the UI, the controls, everything.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I mean, aside from native SVG, which also supports scripting, there's the Canvas tag, which seems to pretty much obsoletes everything to like about Flash as a target. I can see liking Flash as a development tool, but I suspect Adobe will just target HTML5 in the end.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
> Except YouTube does work on the iPad
Oh. The (RipCode) article summary implied otherwise.
If YouTube already works, what's RipCode for? What problem is it solving? I'm missing something.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
One is an insecure runtime that is a blatant hole inside a device's security and allows arbitrary code execution
Would you be kind enough to explain what you mean by insecure? I have seen this written before but no one can ever really explain it.
For sites that only offer flash video.