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YouTube Ditches Flash For HTML5 Video By Default
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube today announced it has finally stopped using Adobe Flash by default. The site now uses its HTML5 video player by default in Google's Chrome, Microsoft's IE11, Apple's Safari 8, and in beta versions of Mozilla's Firefox browser. At the same time, YouTube is now also defaulting to its HTML5 player on the web. In fact, the company is deprecating the "old style" Flash object embeds and its Flash API, pointing users to the iFrame API instead, since the latter can adapt depending on the device and browser you're using.
Now if only Bell Media/CTV here in Canada would do the same. They are the ONLY family of websites I know of that won't work with the Linux versions of Flash, complaining that you need an update because they check for the WINDOWS version numbers.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What does that mean for the future of Adobe?
I am so glad to see this. I tended to watch videos on my macbook quite a bit and always hated that the massive load it put on my system because of how crappy flash was on a mac (or anything else).
Now if google would just announce no more flash allowed in ads, we'd be set.
And I can finally disable flash completely.
If your website still isn't usable without flash in 2015, I'll just go elsewhere.
For many people youtube was the only reason to install flash anymore. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
All I care about is can we lose the ads?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
But, but, who is going to remind me every 36 hours that a new version of flash I need to download (along with crapware) is available?
Now hopefully the BBC will do the same.
...how many nails does this damn coffin need before we can bury it?!
That depends. Do you live in a country where Google's Music Key service is available?
channel customization to remove the bland look like it is now.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Anyone still want to bitch about the lack of flash support in iOS?
How's that android plug in working for you? Oooh. Right. The one the stopped supporting and distributing years ago.
Just uninstalled Flash minutes ago. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but this pushed me to take action.
Now if I run into any site that requires it, I'll just go away.
I found out that the iframe player is the worst resource wise. I post 20 of these stupid iframe's on my site, causes extreme slow down as the same script gets loaded 20 times and is executed twenty times.
Whereas maybe, just maybe, they could find a more efficient way to do it like allowing the page to direct link to the mp4/webm. Or using one script, allowing the page itself to create the html5 player rather than use the I frames.
Because YouTube doesn't have an option I moved to not placing youtube objects on my site, creating it after an image or link had been clicked using interhtml to replace the code as a user intends to actually play that video.
How about letting us buffer the entire video while paused now? Or maybe implementing a more reliable way to jump back in the video without things just hanging entirely... (Chrome 40 here)
Every time I've tried the "HTML5 video" on YouTube, it would:
1) lose sync, or just stop loading,
2) wouldn't let you pause/resume, and
3) didn't properly cache so you could "rewind" without streaming (download the same bits) again.
Or is YouTube yet another site that's now "Best Viewed in Chrome" (TM) ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/youtube-now-defaults-to-html5_27.html
I tried setting Chrome to use HTML5 on YouTube for about a month. I had to switch it back to flash because of one thing - Flashblock. With flashblock, you can open a bunch of videos at once in different tabs, and they will not start playing until you flip to the tab and click the flashblock button. With HTML5, all those videos start playing in the background tabs simultaneously as soon as the pages finish loading. So you're basically limited to opening one video at a time. No queuing up videos you want to watch and flipping through them tab by tab.
Does anyone know of an extension similar to flashblock but for HTML5 on Chrome?
Cause I got no points and that's a handy tip!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Adobe doesn't sell the plugin, they sell their development tools. Those development tools are slowly being switched to html5, so Adobe's customers can continue to use them as always.
It's about time everyone ditch flash. I consistently get a couple of browser lockups due to flash ads on slashdot.
The site now uses its HTML5 video player by default in ............... beta versions of Mozilla's Firefox browser.
So if one is using FireFox, does YouTube work w/o Flash? I thought it was stuck on the WebM vs Ogg Theora debate, which was why as far as YouTube went, FireFox had no option but to do Flash.
On a different note, how is GNU's GNASH?
You mean the web you browse with Google's Chrome, Microsoft's IE11, Apple's Safari 8, and in beta versions of Mozilla's Firefox?
Am I missing something here, or are these sentences completely redundant?
Been using the Download YouTube Videos as MP4 addon for years, together with 865,260 other people.
It creates a css drop down button under the player, you click on it and 320p 720p 1080p links shows up, one more click and you can save the video as mp4.
Never installed flash ever since.
Here are a couple of charts which illustrate the decline of Flash usage on websites. One from Built With and one from W3Techs. The trend is decidedly downwards.
Breaks the "download" functionality supported by by various plugins.
If I switch my user agent to "iPad", the videos play just fine in Safari 7 too.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
This blows as we need IE 8 at work and use YouTube for uploading videos.
Until 2020 the world is not ready as IE 8 is the defacto standard in China and corporate America??
http://saveie6.com/
Still, there's no reason you can't do stuff like that on better, more secure platforms.
In theory, I agree. But in practice, which "better, more secure platforms" for authoring and presenting vector animation on the web would you recommend? And how should we convince contributors to the aforementioned sites to remake their works using the new tech?
I go to get.webgl.org using Firefox 35.0.1 on a laptop with an Intel IGP and all I get is "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." Badgers, on the other hand, still plays perfectly.
Flash doesn't work particularly well on touch screens.
Neither does HTML5 if you abuse onmouseover. The lack of hover is completely orthogonal to the SWF vs. HTML debate.
Animated SVG for the simpler stuff, HTML5 canvas with JavaScript for more complicated animations.
So what tools would you recommend for building these without, say, having to type all the (x, y) coordinates into a script file? I haven't seen any animation stuff in Inkscape, unless there was some recent huge update of which I'm not aware.
Only good news today. Die, flash. Die.
The 2014 versions of Creative Cloud removed Flash export from Premiere, After Effects and Media Converter. If you wanted to retain that functionality, you needed to install a previous version that supported it.
.webm plugin for Premiere and Media Converter. I doubt Adobe is worried about Flash, they have plenty of other applications that are heavily used.
They're concentrating on the other web formats it seems. Someone even created a
Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects and Audition being the ones I am most familiar with.
when the user clicks the url, the browser opens the appropriate application for the urltype.
Which means "the appropriate application for the urltype" needs to exist for the user's platform. Not everyone wants to have to make 14 different apps for 14 different platforms, not to mention that several platforms require a long and involved developer pre-approval process. For example, the Flash Lite player in Internet Channel was the only publicly available game development environment for Wii before that console was cracked.
Sucks to be you, China and Corporate America.
Since you're obviously on Windows, your IT department might want to push out an update--I hear they can do that now.
I use a Libre version of GNU/Linux that does not have Flash and it is such a relief to not get besieged by ads and flash pop ups when I browse the web. If all the ads/pop ups go HTML 5, then I get that annoying crap again. I really like seeing those empty sockets for headers and side bars that beg me to update my version of flash. Bwah-haha! I prefer a peaceful browsing experience.
Edge Animate exists, but you can't buy it. You have to rent it on Creative Butt.
Or did you not know HTML5 could include vector graphics on a canvas??
Or at least admit that your first question was made in ignorance and that you're now looking for another reason why you weren't wrong in the first place?
Don't just pretend that your question was always "What authoring tools do I have?" when your question WAS "What do I use instead?".
M'kay?
The only reason Im using Flash on YT is Google insistence on forcing VP8 on my old Core2 laptop (intel GPU means no hardware video accel).
h.264 with mplayer plays perfectly in 1080p
h.264 with flash plays perfectly in 720p
VP8 with HTML5 stutters in 720p, and still drops frames in 640x480
If/when they finally remove Flash option I will be forced to script direct mplayer streaming of mp4 files from YT server bypassing their player altogether.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Flash was, and is, crap. No iDevice ever had it. And now it is dying. Given the number of iPhones out there, and iPads, etc. I'm not surprised.
I've never installed flash on any machine I've used. I load Chrome for those sites that require flash. And I've not had to use Chrome for months at a time lately. Adobe created a monster and it is dying, finally.
Good riddance.
Debian Wheezy on a i686, 2 gigs ram, 2200 intel core2, nvidia card using nouveau,and with Google Chrome latest stable i went to Youtube and the videos are still showing mixed results, some run smoothly without hitting the CPU much at all, others suck the life out of the CPU @ !00% even worse than compiling source code so my first impression of HTML-5 video is that i am not impressed
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I told you so.
You appear to claim that both WebGL and Flash are "a giant security hole [that] should be avoided like the plague". If this is true, then which technology should be used instead for two- and three-dimensional vector animation?
Yay exposed and buggy interpreters.
I have the feeling you're about to say "native code". The problem is that native code all too often ends up being made for a platform other than the ones you have available to you.
Shitty video streaming for everyone whether you like it or not! Hurrah!!!
Don't just pretend that your question was always "What authoring tools do I have?" when your question WAS "What do I use instead?".
I was trying to avoid causing the XY problem by asking for tools to perform a step toward the wrong goal. Asking "What are usable authoring tools for animated SVG?" isn't helpful when animated SVG itself isn't a viable technology. So instead, I first asked for the right goal (what tech) and followed up by asking for the right step (what authoring tools). My question in full could have been phrased more formally as follows: "What is the most viable technology to replace SWF, and what are usable authoring tools for said technology whatever it might be?" What is the correct etiquette for asking a question contingent on another question?
A lot of Flash animations are likewise sprite-based. Do you know of any good timeline-based sprite animation editors for DHTML or HTML5 Canvas?
without bloating them by a factor of 10 by rendering them to WebM?
Many of the non-interactive videos can be found on Youtube now
That's what I was trying to avoid.
Similarly, most of the game concepts have been replicated in one way or another to various mobile devices.
Many of the mouse-based ones have. But the keyboard-based ones, like the falling object parkour game Tetris'd , wouldn't port very well to an input device that's a flat sheet of glass. I haven't seen a smartphone with a built-in gamepad other than perhaps the outdated, overpriced Xperia Play.
It just warms my heart to use the truth and get under the skin of trolls like of you.
Libertarian trolls like you always get really upset when you get stuck with your own: "Man up, deal with it and take responsibility" rhetoric.
If you knew your business, you would have known a long time ago and taken action so it wouldn't be a problem. But you've profited and dodged responsibility for years and now it's time to pay up!
I love it!
Always was, always will be.
So far, HTML5 playback only gives me 360p quality, with no DASH support.
Flash playback gives me 480p, DASH support (so I stop using the network if I hit pause, and don't bloat my browser memory usage on long videos).
HTML playback does give me speed control.
But I can already download a 360p and watch in mplayer/vlc for better speed control if I wanted that.
It was about f*cking time!