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.'"

Comments

This meets all of Apple's requirements except one

[aapold]

Killing flash.

Thus, I'll expect they'll patch in a way to detect and block this ASAP.

Re:This meets all of Apple's requirements except o

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares really? Even macworld says the iPhad is crap.

Re:This meets all of Apple's requirements except o

[MoonBuggy]

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?

Re:This meets all of Apple's requirements except o

[Yvanhoe]

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.

Re:This meets all of Apple's requirements except o

[fermion]

Exactly. Many people don't notice, and would be perfectly happy, not to have the flash sites where menus do unexpected things and objects float around and otherwise don't let you get anything done.

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.