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Twitch Is Ditching Flash For HTML5, Just Like YouTube
An anonymous reader writes: Twitch is becoming the latest to transition from Adobe Flash to HTML5. Twitch will start to release its HTML5-based video player controls slowly and in small increments. The video underneath the controls will still be powered by Flash for now. Twitch says this is "an important step to releasing the much-anticipated full HTML5 player" and to "stay tuned for more HTML5 updates."
Heck, even many websites that still require Flash for desktop browsers will happily send HTML5 video to mobile browsers.
For example, the BBC. You go to videos on BBC and it says "Plugin required", so I go up and change my User Agent to iPad, and *WHAM*, the video plays using HTML5 without a problem.
THE CODE IS ALREADY DONE!!!! Why don't they just throw the switch?
Seriously... I'm just waiting for the few sites I visit that still uses flash to ditch it, for me to uninstall Flash entirely. All those updates nearly every week.. ugh.
mod Anon up ...
can i search twitch on the fire tv? no? how about we fix that....and chat that would be nice too but search is more important
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
But with the recent security zero-days Ubuntu implemented an ask first policy. And I now see the message on virtually every friggin' website, even text-only sites. Why do so many websites use flash for things that the user doesn't need ? I can understand for videos or games, but for a forum...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Technology non grata
But what of the hugely lucrative facebook games cartels?
And will Twitch also switch to WebM? I didn't know that site until now to care about.
For live video, there is no working standard. HLS is used by Safari on Mac, iOS, supposedly MS Edge (I haven't tested to see how well supported it is) and is very buggy in Android (to the point of being unusable). There are some data injector APIs for the latest versions of FF and Chrome where there have been attempts to implement HLS and DASH, but they are buggy at best and not suitable for production. Additionally, using HTTP based streaming standards (such as HLS) for fully live results in very long delays (up to 30 seconds) Trying to use overly small segments to reduce latency results in video breaking up unless the latency between server and client is extremely low.
For long format on demand video, there is an enormous amount of wasted bandwidth as the MOOV atom of an MP4 is transmitted before the video is playable. For a short video, the MOOV atom is small. For an 8 hour video, the MOOV atom can be huge. This presents a problem for support of long format video for people on slower or metered connections.
The only thing the video tag does somewhat consistently across platforms is play back h.264 baseline+aac MP4 on demand videos that are relatively short format .
None of these problems exist with flash. Seamless switching between bit rates is also an issue (works well on fully implemented HLS clients, but generally a problem everywhere else). In the mean time, to support live the best bet is often RTSP on most android (or a commercial third party HLS library deployed in an app), HLS on iOS, some TV devices and on the few supported browsers on desktop and flash for everything else on desktop (where there are player implementations that support HLS).
Yes, flash has a history of security problems. There are still many things that it does much better and more consistently than HTML/JS. I'd love to dump it, but there aren't any solutions that work well for live without a plugin across all platforms.
"I told you so." - Steve Jobs
So, nobody on the planet has heard of this "Twitch" thing.... but now with one simple "Hey, we're just like YouTube" press release, they've become known. Brilliant.
I guess "We had the same massive security hole as YouTube, but it took us months longer to fix it" wouldn't have been quite as effective.
Per Mozilla's description of the <video> element:
Then it may or not start playing automatically
The autoplay attribute of the <video> element controls this. Which browser autoplays even if the autoplay attribute is not specified?
Some systems may display a play/pause/bla bar, others will not.
The controls attribute of the <video> element controls this. Which browser shows controls if the controls attribute is not specified or hides controls if the controls attribute is specified? But I'll grant that live streaming is more likely to need custom JavaScript controls.
I've been youtubing flash-free using Firefox for months now.
Caveat: This may require you to create an account and set an option somewhere.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
Will the HTML5 player be as CPU intensive as the flash player, as in, completely unusable in full screen or high quality...?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
I feel like this term HMTL5 is misleading - its a codec war between h.264 and vp8. Google threw down with buying On2 and open sourcing it to escape paying for h.264 which microsoft owns. It's inside the webm container with vorbis which is under rapid adoption.
Adobe still has its clutches on flash, and its premiere which refuse to support it officially, same with apple. But lets take a look at what does support it. Wow, only apple and IE, fancy that.
Adding to the fact imgur and 'gfycat' try and fence sit by creating a wrapper and container both an mp4 and webm file with the latter offering a baseline profile on their h.264 inside the mp4 for wider support and imgur shitting the bed.
The multiple amounts of profiles available for h.264 might create better quality/size comparisons on benchmarks with vp8 but does the codec a disservice when trying to become a standard. Plus, its still licensed code.
Or more properly called Local Shared Objects