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Facebook Is Transcoding Video For iPad
Stoobalou sounds another death knell for Flash video. He says "Another heavy user of Adobe's video streaming software Flash is now pandering to the all-powerful iPad. Everybody's favourite waste of time, social notworking monster Facebook, is now streaming user videos to Apple's second coming of the portable computer with no sign of Flash in sight."
social notworking
I propose the refusal of such tag in Slashdot, on the basis of ubiquity.
Facebook may very well already be encoding its videos in H.264 (which is supported by Flash). In this case, all they need to do is to wrap the files into an MP4 container, with no transcoding necessary.
YouTube already supports this, and I imagine, will begin to do it by default in the near future.
Thanks for straightening me out. Well, I suppose that's what I get for reading the article:
So rather than using HTML5, Facebook is actually detecting that the iPad's Safari browser is in the mix, and is transcoding the original video format to MP4 on the fly.
I constantly forget about the container when dealing with video and audio file formats ... you would think I would have learned by now after using VLC so much to stream internet radio stations to both MP3 and Ogg formats for replay later with no internet connection. Could somebody explain to me what the container brings? I understand we gain compression and save space with the encoding of the material but why are there so many containers that describe how that encoding is stored? What trade offs do these containers bring and why are they so goddamn proprietary when they seem to provide little real value for the actual data being stored? It's simply some meta data about the actual data so why is it such a thorn in everyone's side? I don't develop in this realm so please tolerate my ineptitude and help me out here. It often confusese me relentlessly and I am dumbfounded at how these two things are mired in litigation.
My work here is dung.
The iPad isn't particularly innovative, IMO; it's just likely well designed, well manufactured, well marketed, and has an extremely famous brand associated with it.
I'm no Apple fanboy and I don't own an iPad, but your analysis doesn't seem exactly fair. The iPad isn't purely a product of slick design and branding (though that sure hasn't hurt.) Remember that when the iPhone interface came out it revolutionized the mobile phone UI world. Since then nearly all of the major manufacturers have completely reworked their UIs to mimic the touch-based interface-- Microsoft even scrapped their existing Mobile OS and completely replaced it. Palm is about to go out of business. The idea of a capacitive, multi-touch based interface with software designed from the ground up may not have been strictly novel (i.e., the component pieces were all out there), but Apple's method of integrating them all was really was a huge advance.
Now it may seem reasonable to say that the iPad is just an iPhone scaled up to tablet size, so while the iPhone might count, the iPad is not a huge innovation. What this overlooks is that the iPad is just the second incarnation of the iPhone UI --- i.e., it's mostly the same innovation, but it's one that hasn't fully run its course. Taking that very successful UI approach up to tablet size may be an obvious step, but it's a worthy step that no competitors have been able to do convincingly. The tablet market was very close to zero right pre-iPad, and that's not all due to bad branding on the part of the existing tabletmakers. Mostly it's because the previous generation of tablets were very different animals and nobody wanted them (outside of a handful of specific fields). I'm guessing that if the iPad takes off (and a slew of Android/MS competitors succeed in its footsteps) it's not going to be due to good design and branding.