Adobe Adopts HTTP Live Streaming For iOS

unassimilatible writes "Ars Technica reports that Adobe has capitulated in the iOS-Flash war, and has adopted HTTP live streaming for iOS. HTTP Live Streaming is a protocol that Apple developed to stream live and recorded video using standard HTTP connections instead of the more difficult to optimize RTSP. It uses H.264-encoded video and AAC or MP3 audio packaged into discrete chunks of an MPEG-2 transport stream, along with a .m3u playlist to catalog the files that make up the individual chunks of the stream. QuickTime on both Mac OS X and iOS can play back this format, and it is the only streaming format compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch."

Comments

Not the first concession for adobe.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Given Wallaby, Adobe's flash to HTML5 converter, this is by no means adobe's feat concession nor it's last. iOS is here to stay and adobe is slowly getting on board.

Re:Not the first concession for adobe.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that(with the exception of licensing embedded clients, which(if the dire performance on Android is any indication), they'll have increasing trouble even giving away... Adobe's client side flash/AIR stuff is a pure cost center designed to drive sales of their content-creation suit and assorted server offerings, they don't really have anything to gain by attempting a fight to the last on the client side.

Back when they could actually claim adoption rates in 95+ percent range without the slightest doubt, I suspect that having client ubiquity certainly was helpful; but they would be insane to alienate the customers who actually buy stuff in some sort of fight to ensure that the customers who just download stuff and encounter ghastly security problems can continue to do so.

They will, presumably, walk away by half measures, in order to try to milk RTMPe and other benefits of flash client ubiquity as long as possible; but there is nothing inimical to their actual profit sources in building HTML5 related tools...

Re:Not the first concession for adobe.

[spud603]

Syntax Error: unmatched "(" in nested parenthetical near line 1.

Re:Not the first concession for adobe.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I can' t argue with your correctness(or my error). I can suggest that you really should study for that Turing test a bit...

Re:Not the first concession for adobe.

[hairyfeet]

You know what? I don't think it is so much that "flash sucks" so much as when Adobe bought it they didn't really have a game plan and the code they had only ran on win X86 and frankly that is the same to this day. Flash on win x86? It runs just fine. Runs fine in Win X64 since the browsers are all 32 bit. Everywhere else? Steaming pile of stinky.

So it looks, just from me watching the history of the thing, that they made the classic buyer's mistake. they probably let everyone that was really good at the code behind flash waltz out the door and then milked it for all it was worth. But times change, win x86 isn't the end all be all anymore, and it looks like Adobe simply hasn't been able to keep up.

But then again Adobe never were the brightest bulbs in the sign. Macromedia Xres was a great image manipulation software that they could have sold very nicely in the low to mid market, and used it as an upsell to Photoshop. They have also bloated the living shit out of PDF by jamming everything AND the kitchen sink into what was supposed to be a portable office format, not a fricking office suite or multimedia presentation, with predictable results.

So to me the questions are thus: Will Adobe be able to adapt, or will they go the way of the 8 track? And if flash goes tits up, what will replace it? Because frankly from what I've seen HTML V5 sucks on less than a dual core unless you have some sort of acceleration for it. H.26x is great and does have acceleration, but FOSS won't touch it because of patents, WMV is okay but only on Win, Quicktime sucks, Theora would have been great 10 years ago but sucks now as it eats too many cycles for less quality than H.26x, so what is left?

Because I REALLY don't want to go back to the 90s, with a dozen competitive formats all with bugs and hassles, and since it looks like Apple and MSFT are sticking with HTML V5 H.26x that will end up fractured. Sigh, I have a feeling it is gonna be a big clusterfuck like the 90s all over again. Say what you want about flash, but at least every machine from a PIII to the latest multicore could run it, and nearly everyone already had it installed.

More difficult to optimize?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

RTSP has the major disadvantage of not infrequently including assorted vendor's special secret sauces, meant to drive lock-ins between server software and client software(and/or satisfy somebody's demand for DRM); but does anybody have a technical explanation of why bog-standard RTSP, an RFC implemented by a bunch of vendors(including Apple), is worse than HTTP for media streaming? "More difficult to optimize" is pretty vague.

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[gig]

One issue is some networks block RTSP, but not HTTP.

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The patent system works in mysterious ways, so there certainly could be a giant clusterfuck of submarine patents lurking out there; but the RFC was released in '98, and the list of vendors and OSS projects with source, sink, or both support is not a short one(and includes Apple's own proprietary OSX server media streaming package). Whatever video/audio codecs you are streaming on top of RTMP are almost certainly going to land you in a giant heap of trouble; but I would expect RTMP itself to either be harmless or driven into some sort of cross-licensing stalemate by now. Individual vendor extensions, of course, particularly DRM related ones, for which the DMCA can come to the field, are presumably a mess; but Apple's ability to say "The RTMP that is real RTMP is the RTMP that iOS recognizes as such, suck it down." would seem to be equal to its ability to say "HTTP live streaming is the new flavor of the month. RTMP is dead."

I'm certainly not up on the details of live media streaming; but I've never seen a clear breakdown of why RTMP is obviously fucked compared to the alternatives.

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[Anonymous Coward]

The RTSP protocol is pretty complex compared to HTTP streaming. For example, the RTSP doesn't specify the underlying transport, which "normally" is UDP with TCP fallback. Due to these complexities cell phone vendors have a hard time implementing bug free RTSP support in their video players. Seeking (in VODs) for instance was not supported on any device I tried (most popular handsets in the EU at the time). RTSP was obviously specifically developed to stream multimedia so it has a lot of features HTTP lacks (bandwidth detection, time synchronisation, mulitple streams etc). However plain HTTP streaming is good enough for 95% of the use cases.
It's funny though, because Apple wrote DarwinStreamingServer, which for a long time was the best free RTSP server available.
Last time I worked with RTSP was about 3 years ago so stuff may have changed (tm).

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[NatasRevol]

What a dipshit. Apple's streaming server software has supported RTSP for a long time. Long before HTTP live streaming.

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[mbone]

My understanding is that this is purely about ease of use of getting through firewalls, NATs and PATs. Everything passes HTTP, and there is no other transport protocol (not even UDP over port 80) for which that is true.

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[Jon Stone]

Is tunnelling "every protocol known to man" over HTTP the answer? If you allow HTTP through the firewall today, you're essentially allowing anything. If the firewall blocks RTSP, it's probably because the owner of the network didn't want all the bandwidth taken up by realtime streaming media...

Borg

[Anonymous Coward]

So, are we going to get a Steve Jobs Borg icon soon?

Or a generic borg in a black faux turtleneck and jeans?

Just any old borg with the Apple logo on it?

Resistance is futile. You will abandon Flash.

Sign me up. Gimme my implants!

Already supported on Android 3.0 Honeycomb too!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can view the live streams on Android Tablets running Honeycomb.
I just tested this at work the past week. Didn't have to do anything different using the Wowza Streaming server and Wirecast Encoder. One stream played on both an iOS iPad and Motorola Android Xoom tablet.

Re:IOS

[Nethead]

I remember back in the late 90s when we had hubs, not switches, someone came up with a perl script to monitor the wire looking for .gif and .jpg files and would then tile them on a display screen with the IP of the host viewing them. The sales department at that ISP sure got in trouble that day!

Re:Not all optimization is technical in nature.

[immaterial]

What are you smoking? "HTTP" has zero "buzzword-factor," and the average Internet user (clueless executive or otherwise) doesn't connect it with anything, beyond (maybe, if they're paying the slightest bit of attention) "those pointless extra letters in the address bar."

Re:IOS

[Roogna]

Apple actually licenses the trademark iOS from Cisco. There's no evil theft going on.

There Goes My Undeserving Superiority

[selex]

Now I can't stick my nose up at all those iPhone uses when I show them Flash enabled web content on my Droid. Thanks Adobe. Selex

So is this is a win for Linux?

[Compaqt]

Does this mean we can also piggyback off of the Apple concession to get access to the HTTP stream without having to go through Flash?