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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.
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.