Adobe Releases Its Own HTML5 Video Player

An anonymous reader writes "Webmonkey has an interesting tidbit about Adobe's release of its own HTML5 video player: 'Adobe has released an embeddable video player that plays HTML5 native video in browsers that support it, and falls back to Flash in browsers that don't. It's cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don't support Flash. Using Adobe's new player, these devices can show videos in web pages without the Flash plug-in.'"

Comments

Re:But why?

[Tharsman]

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Adobe is not in the business of selling Flash Plugins, they are in the business of selling Flash Authoring Tools and Server Side technology. iTechnology has been selling like crazy, and hate as you may, it has started to result in pages that are designed to run in iDevices.

With all these pages now out there, Flash suddenly becomes optional, it will not take long before Flash's buggy security issues make many to opt out of using Flash and just fall back on the HTML5 pages that were designed for the iDevices. It is wise of them to try to stop the flocking early, avoid people from developing their own home grown HTML5 Plug N Play migration tools, and offer them first.

Once the big players opt to go Adobe's route, they may secure their web authoring dominance in a Flash Free World Wide Web.

Not a support issue

[Angst Badger]

It's cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don't support Flash.

It would be more accurate to say that iPhones and iPads don't permit Flash. Adobe would be more than happy to support Flash on those platforms -- and probably has code ready to go -- if Apple allowed them to deploy it. The difference is significant and should not be ignored: Flash doesn't work on iDevices because Apple doesn't want it to. It's a repeat of Microsoft's unofficial MSDOS-era policy, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run," only much, much more brazen.

(Before we resurrect the flamewar about why Apple doesn't allow Flash on its iDevices, allow me to note that I detest Flash and understand Apple's objections, at least the technical ones. I just think that users should be allowed to use whatever software they want on the devices that they've paid for, no matter how much it sucks.)