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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."
How many times have we already said farewell to Flash and it still refuses to die...
Go to the BBC site with a desktop browser, it's Flash all the way. Now go on iOS (I would guess also Android) and magically it's HTML 5. Set the user agent to identify as an iPad and you get the identical layout to the desktop browsers but HTML 5 media.
Now why on earth is that? That's actually more effort to maintain than just doing it right in the first place. OK so you have older version browser support, but there are better ways to identify those than just "are you a desktop OS trying to access me?".
Any HTML5 blockers out there, because we know the scum from marketing department will have us Punching Monkeys in HTML5 in no time.
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.
You realize its only a matter of time until companies splice ads into the content itself so filtering will be impossible.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
All HTML5 browsers should have an EnableVideo code setting.
So that I can turn it off.
I don't need your video. I don't want your video. I don't want it to autoplay.
If you have an ad, you can show it in text, and stop sucking up bandwidth.
Now, if you want to give me a box that I can right click on to "play video", great.
But as Leelu would say "Not without my permission!"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
For all that I've hated Flash for years (for idiosyncratic reasons), and loathe Flash now (for all the usual reasons), there is a great deal of (old) content dependent on Flash. Will that content (like a Flash version of Portal) become inaccessible?
Archivists are probably dreading dealing with this.
Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary),
More like change is expensive. It has nothing to do with scary.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Try punching a midget in the cock and he'll bleed for an hour... from his nose.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I was a big fan and user of flash LONG before it did anything video related. Flash for videos? Let it die, it's awful for that purpose. Flash for anything else? I don't think it's going away any time soon.
People have been making vector animations in Flash long before anyone thought of ruining web video by using Flash to play it, and Flash excels at that purpose better than anything else.
By having the majority of undesirable web content stuck in easy-to-flag Flash buckets, it was inherently simple to block that content. I could simply whitelist a handful of sites whose flash content I wanted to see (e.g. Youtube) and block it pretty much everywhere else.
Now with everything moving to HTML5, I fear the necessary blocking ruleset will gets many times more complicated and with more false positives and negatives to boot. Am I wrong?
Nope. That is ALREADY done on broadcast TV and devices can filter out those ad's. my MythTV box strips out every single TV commercial that is spliced into the content.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
People have been making vector animations in Flash long before anyone thought of ruining web video by using Flash to play it
Agreed. But a lot of Slashdot users have recommended rendering vector animations to video and serving them to viewers as video, viewer's monthly caps be damned. That's how modern Flash cartoons such as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are produced. Apparently bloating the data size by a factor of ten (in my tests) is worth not having to worry about the speed of the viewer's computer.
and Flash excels at that purpose better than anything else.
Do you mean Adobe Flash is better for making them than Adobe Edge Animate, or Flash Player is better for playing them than HTML5 Canvas?
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.
Failing that I will wget it and do it myself.
If you are manually editing content just to eliminate something you could have easily spent 30 seconds ignoring, then you are in serious need fo some therapy.
Always wondered how the piracy sites were getting content that is "supposedly protected"
Guess we'll just have to force DRM on all video streams so that potential blockers can't tell ads from content.
the FCC mandates a 1-frame black burst before and after commercial breaks
Tell that to at least one of my local TV stations that does a multi-frame fade between one of their self-advertisements and the program being returned to. Yes, prime-time on a major US broadcast network. I don't have cable (antenna-only), and it's not the only channel that does a quick fade in and out of programs. The good news is that more often than not, there's usually at least one black key frame between commercials and program.
I don't trust my MythTV box's ability to detect commercials, but I've got pretty good at manually snipping them from the shows that I want to keep around. But I still let it run so that the little flag icon is there to remind me to remove them myself. (yes, it's shameful)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I am all for HTML5 improved support and standard but our experence with various HTML5 implementation is that developpers actually spend a LOT of time accomodating the differences between browsers and browser versions.
Not only between mobile and desktop but between different browsers and different version of the SAME browser.
Different implementations of the same standards are almost always breaking the code.
So on the contrary using HTML5 increases the development time and maintenance cost as web sites or web apps have to be "corrected" to follow browser support or interpretation of HTML5.
In comparison, such maintenance for flash applications is close to nil even flash was upgraded from version 5 to version 11.
However, I agree that flash beiing proprietary, it is not the way to go now.