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A Farewell To Flash
An anonymous reader writes: The decline of Flash is well and truly underway. Media publishers now have no choice but to start changing the way they bring content to the web. Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary), but it will almost certainly be better for all of us in the long run. "By switching their platform to HTML5, companies can improve supportability, development time will decrease and the duplicative efforts of supporting two code bases will be eliminated. It will also result in lower operating costs and a consistent user experience between desktop and mobile web." This is on top of the speed, efficiency, and security benefits for consumers. "A major concern for publishers today is the amount of media consumption that's occurring in mobile environments. They need to prioritize providing the best possible experience on mobile, and the decline of Flash and movement to HTML5 will do just that, as Flash has never worked well on mobile."
flash is an inextricable touchstone of practically every KVM in the datacenter that doesnt show up on a rickety cart.
Flash is the mandatory model of how VMWare has decided (infuriatingly and incorrectly i might stress) we shall all interact with their products.
Flash still powers billboards and advertisement hardware for countless products.
and most important: Flash is still required to view a substantial amount of internet pornography.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yup. Besides, HTML5 has to match the critical features that attracted certain types of website to Flash in the first place.
1. It has to support streaming. There's no universally supported protocol for streaming right now, not RTMP, not HLS, nothing.
2. It has to be hard to rip the stream. There's kinda-sorta DRM in HTML5, but it requires plug-ins (actually, worse than that, in practice it requires the plug-ins be compiled into the browser executable. No more using unofficial Firefox builds), which means it has the same damned problem Flash had in the first place.
Those are just the headline issues.
We'll get there, eventually. But the DRM thing in particular isn't doing anyone any favors.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Here's why I disable ads on Slashdot: VIDEO!
If all their ads were static, I would be happy to uncheck Disable Ads...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
In the US, at least, that happens only because the FCC mandates a 1-frame black burst before and after commercial breaks, and none in the middle of commercial breaks. Obviously, anyone can pick up on this and snip everything between them. Of course, networks now like to introduce them into the middle of programming to throw the count off and hopefully trick some DVR's into ruining a recording to teach the dirty rotten content thieves a lesson (or something). Most DVR's have a few other tricks up their sleeves to make sure they don't fall for it, though.
The point, though, is that no such requirement to insert those start/stop markers exists for web video delivery. Your MythTV box would struggle quite a bit if it didn't have those convenient markers. It's like, instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack using a magnet, trying to find a toothpick in an uncut piece of lumber that is about to be used to make toothpicks. With a magnet. In other words, good luck with that.
I uninstalled Flash in 2009 and for some reason I'm still alive! :-O
youtube-dl downloads and streams video and audio from about 500 legacy sites in the quality of your choice.
livestreamer streams live video from about 70 legacy sites such as the popular "Twitch".
VLC and mpv also can play video from some sites directly, e.g. YouTube.
You can thank Google for that. They tricked the majority of web masters into using third party domains for essential parts of the web site, so blocking all third party content is no longer feasible. There is no good technical reason for doing it, but Google's recommendations made sure that unwanted content is now mixed into a sea of necessary assets loaded from separate domains.
I don't know what recommendations you're speaking of, but there are actually very good security reasons for using separate domains wherever possible. The Same Origin policy implemented by all modern browsers enables the use of domains as client-side content sandboxes of a sort. You can safely load content, including scripts, from one domain with good reason to believe it cannot access or manipulate content from another domain.
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8264/why-is-the-same-origin-policy-so-important
And, yes, Google does this extensively with its own web properties, using different domains to carefully separate components unless the components have specific and valid reasons to interact. Not because Google thinks that one of its components might be malicious, but because subtle and unanticipated interactions can cause unexpected problems and leaks.
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