Name a game where you'd be willing to have an input lag of a half-second for perfect accuracy. Pretty much any game-type you can name would be better played with either a controller or a mouse.
First off the latency wasn't half a second, it was estimated at 133ms even with unknown factors such as the latency of the TV, game settings and unoptimized code to consider. Second, plenty of casual or sedate games would benefit from motion sensing that tried to smooth out spikes caused by wobbly hands or whatever. Casual gamers don't need twitchy controls.
Eurogamer have already run a report with Sony techs stating precisely that. Specifically "If you want to make a more casual game, you smooth [jitter] out. It introduces latency when you smooth things but for a casual user, maybe that's a better thing. As a developer, you have control of this. If you want to make a hardcore game with precise tracking or if you want to make a more casual game, or give some help to the user you can do that." .
So games can be tuned for smoothness or twitchiness. A game like Socom for example is more interested in how the user is flicking the controller around rather than the ball on the end so perhaps smoothing is turned off and the camera sample rate dialled down to lower CPU and increase responsiveness.
Some games may well be taking the average of several samples to dampen out jitter caused by the system or just the person's hand's trembling. That's going to make the onscreen response smoother but it will introduce latency.
Also, just because the camera is pointing at the user doesn't mean it's capturing their movements at 60fps. I imagine the sample rate is tunable depending on the kind of game being played. Some games may only "sync" with the ball every 10th of a second, others more, others less and some won't even use the camera at all. Without the positional tracking of the camera, the controller is likely to be as fast as a regular controller.
I guess all these things are tweakable and it's up to games to make the right trade off between accuracy and responsiveness depending on what kind of game they are.
I'm surprised I haven't seen PS3 fanboys laughing about this before.. it's even worse than not being able to watch DVDs on your Wii's DVD drive..
The PS3 let's you plug any FAT formatted devices into the PS3 and read / write unprotected content to & from the device. You can also backup your files to a device assuming it has the space. What you can't do is use the disk for ad hoc storage of protected content except through the backup mechanism.
The MS solution appears to repartition the device. Presumably the partition will be formatted and encrypted so the 360 can read & write protected content. The advantage would be that it probably allows the device to store games and other data, but it doesn't help if you intend to use the device in other ways or to transfer content.
Is this actually a problem for anyone? Who owns a Wii, doesn't own a DVD player but has a desire to play DVDs? DVD players are so cheap you just go and buy one.
That may be so, but it doesn't explain why the Wii doesn't offer DVD playback even as a feature available for a nominal sum of money. Some people don't like having two devices plugged into their TV when the one they already own is more than adequate for the task.
That's £30 on top of the money you pay for a passport. And once you obtain an ID you are compelled to keep it up to date forever. I have yet to see ANY reason that people should carry a card which cannot be satisfied in other ways. Criminals, terrorists and illegal immigrants don't play by the rules that ID cards are meant to enforce so introducing such a scheme seems utterly pointless.
The Conservative party have pledged to scrap them too which IMO is the sensible and good thing. Generally I agree with Labour policy but they've really lost the plot on this issue.
I don't know if Security Essentials is a good antivirus app - probably not as good as some products but a lot better than nothing so long as you don't treat it as a substitute for common sense. It's incredibly unobtrusive which is a refreshing change compared to some of the bloatware out there.
Therefore, it's very important to check the "Requirements" for a game before you buy, even if your PC will clearly be capable of running it. Respectable stores like Steam will warn you about the types of DRM used by the game in clear terms, and you can decide whether it's too much. This information isn't in large text in the centre of the screen as it should be ("Warning: SecuROM", "Danger - Game Published By Ubisoft") but it's there, and these days you must always check for it
The problem with "respectable" stores like Steam is you get two doses of DRM - Steam's DRM and sometimes even more. Whether they so or not, it's still not an acceptable situation. The DRM in Steam might be relatively benign (at the moment), but it seems to work so I do not understand why publishers want to incur the expense of even more. But they do and so Steam users are rewarded with even more restrictions. Not only do Valve have you by the balls but the publisher too.
I'd add that even though Steam's DRM might be relatively benign now, but who's to say it has to stay that way? What if Valve decide they're going to start charging a buck per-download if you download a game more than 10 times, or if you want to download more than 60 days after purchase? Or if you install a game on more than 5 computers? Or premium online play? Or just any other crap they can concoct? The fact is that they are a benevolent dictator but all that could change in an instant. The tighter their grip becomes in the digital download space the more certain that changes will come and you can bet they won't all be for the good.
Flash is an optional addon. There is no optional addon to play h.264
Yes there is. VLC is just one example of a plugin that plays h264. Furthermore many operating systems come with a h264 licence so how hard would it be to build a plugin over the platform's media libraries to play content?
Theora is a lame duck and its never going to take off and its no pretending it will. Mozilla can ship it if they want by default but they have to open up the video tag to plugins and (better yet) start using the native licence where it exists.
If you don't run IE why do you even care about ActiveX then? Your gripe should be with the NPAPI which provides virtually an identical attack surface for sites that want to exploit Flash, Acrobat etc.
ActiveX as implemented in older versions of Internet Explorer was very dangerous but in its current form, it is relatively benign and certainly no worse than other plugin mechanisms. IE by default will not offer to install arbitrary objects or allow them to be scripted.
Furthermore ActiveX when used outside of Internet Explorer is just a set of APIs to implement and instantiate some object residing in a DLL or EXE using COM/DCOM. It's no more or less dangerous than the equivalent functionality to be found in other desktops, e.g. DBus, Bonobo, Kparts etc.
Also did you know that much of Mozilla is implemented as XPCOM objects which have a virtually identical lifecycle to an ActiveX component - nsISupports is analogous to IUnknown, components reside in DLLs or.js files. etc. Did you know that any add-on for Mozilla runs with chrome privileges and has the the power to instantiate any of these components and script them? There are some components in Mozilla with incredible exploit potential, components which could upload your password file to some server for example.
If don't even use IE, I suggest you worry about what your browser *does* implement rather than ActiveX.
3. Kill ActiveX - I know of no legitimate website besides Microsoft.com that requires ActiveX.
ActiveX is how your browser runs Flash, Silverlight, Acrobat, Java etc. through IE. So yes it has uses. And in those cases its not more or less dangerous than the equivalent NPAPI plugin. Both allow binary code to be executed (and scripted) with content supplied from an external site. The danger is that if you don't keep your plugins or controls up to date you might be vulnerable to attack.
Not necessarily. I could pipe content which I have decrypted and validated from a DRM'd container to a GPLv3 application for decoding. Alternatively I might modify the GPL app to call out to my proprietary process to decode the content for much the same effect. Nothing to stop me doing that at all. I could even supply the source of my modifications and it wouldn't necessarily help someone crack the DRM. If it was an LGPL v3 library (as most codecs are likely to be), I wouldn't even have to bother separating the DRM code and the decoder into separate processes either.
100% performance hit... In 18 months double of nothing is still nothing. Assuming you meant sucky software only vs hardware accelerated playback, I expect the vast majority number of people would go for the latter because their principle concern is doing stuff like playing video, and not worrying if their codec or graphics driver are open source.
Besides which you confuse and conflate free, open standards and DRM all into one. For example h264 is an open standard but its not free (although the majority of people get it for free through a plugin or their OS, or the patent laws of their land). Additionally h264 could be bundled up in a regular mp4 or mkv container without any DRM but someone could wrap it up in DRM if they wanted. Someone could even wrap theora (a free and open standard) up with DRM if they so wished.
Granted it's not cutting edge but a tri core power pc chip running at 3.2ghz doesn't seem to qualify as a "low powered box" to me.
It is by modern computing standards, especially when the CPU is meant to be busy doing what the console is meant for which is playing games. If one core or one hardware thread is occupied 100% processing images and making sense of them, it obviously impacts on game performance.
And what do you mean by moving out onto the CPU? MS moved all the processing onto the Xbox really early on with Natal to bring retail costs down when and if this ever hits the shelves.
Exactly what I said. The original vision, the one Microsoft officially announced and stuck with for some time stated that the image and the resulting model would be produced in the device. That's quite an elegant solution and certainly minimizes on memory & CPU consumption. Now all the raw data must be transferred to the CPU which has an significant impact on accuracy, resolution, latency, sample frequency, memory and CPU availability.
At a stroke it completely changes what sort of recognition and games are viable. Natal has become a glorified EyeToy from this change. In some sense that isn't a bad thing, but I doubt it means you will see anything which is very sophisticated. In its favour Natal is obviously a cheaper and simpler solution than the Wand by a large margin and therefore it could be far more successful, or at least profitable. But from a gaming standpoint I have no doubt that the results will be pretty insipid by comparison.
I assume Sony knows this, so they're probably just putting a toe in the water to see if its worth building this into their next-gen system. They'll probably make some money off this, but there's no way in hell this is going to steal much market share from the Wii -- there simply won't be many decent games. If the Wii has taught as anything, its that shoehorning motion control into a game doesn't really work; to work right the game needs to really be designed with motion control in mind. Unfortunately, I suspect that's what we'll see of most PS3 Move games: it will be an afterthought.
I think you're right. Lots of early PS3 games made rather pointless use of the sixaxis, for example Rainbow 6 Vegas used tilt for the snakecam and it was ludicrously bad. Fortunately there are some games that use the motion sensing in reasonable ways but it has to be used judiciously and where it makes sense.
If the Move is to be successful it too must also be used judiciously and where it is used it has to be treated as a 1st class peer of the sixaxis. For example Sony is talking of using it in Socom 4. That's great but if people using the Move get their ass handed to them by people using controllers, it will suck hard. The Move has amazing potential thanks to its precision but it has to be pushed by Sony and made easy for 3rd parties too.
In terms of market share, I can well see Sony bundling up the PS3 and games with the Move. They've done it with the PS Eye and wireless headsets after all and often for quite reasonable sums. It's never going to beat out the sixaxis but they could certainly build up a large enough user base to make it worthwhile. After all, the likes of Guitar Hero, Buzz, Singstar, Wii Fit et al demonstrate you can sell millions of peripherals that only work with one game franchise so why not a controller which works with a range? Also, just the fact of offering such bundles may make some of the casual potential customers of the Wii waiver choose a PS3 instead which can hardly hurt the bottom line.
Technically it is more interesting but in practice I think it will suck. Recognizing full or partial body motion and doing so with an acceptable level of accuracy on a low powered box in realtime would be hideously difficult in the best of circumstances let alone the average person's home with furniture, lighting, clothes, other people, skin colour and other factors thrown in.
The live demos so far suggest latency and exaggerated motions are going to feature quite prominently, especially now MS are saying much of the processing is moving out onto the CPU.
A late response (I was on vacation). I like annotations since they eliminate a lot of drudgery but I still think there are occasions when XML or a separate file is a better approach, even for persistence APIs. Say for example you missed some constraint and had to fix it, it would be far easier to fix by tweaking an XML file rather than dragging in development, qa & release engineers to rebuild the application. In general though annotations is far simpler to deal with.
Persistence is just a bad idea, it hides the real performance issues of how databases work, and limits how you can easily manipulate the data.
That assumes performance is somebody's number 1 priority. An app might use something like OpenJPA or Hibernate because code correctness, scalability, time to market or portability are more important than performance. Besides, I bet for typical database queries, the performance boost from handwriting SQL vs Hibernate (hql) / OpenJPA (jpql) generating it would be neglible. If you absolutely had to hand tune some SQL you could even slap it in a stored proc or function which is probably a good idea anyway for some actions.
If performance or a legacy database was a concern all over the place then iBatis or its ilk might be a better fit. Then you can handwrite every SQL call but at least it sits in an XML file so it doesn't pollute the application code. It's still harder to code than using a persistence API though.
Europe. Even people in the US who has Windows 7 or Mac OS X or any platform that has already paid for the licence, or has installed a codec such as DIVX 7. Much of the world in other words is quite capable of playing H264 legally.
Besides the browser doesn't have to support H264 to play H264. Firefox doesn't have built-in Flash support yet somehow manages to render Flash content. How? Because it invokes a plugin produced by Adobe to play the content. Video should be little different - if Firefox doesn't recognize the input it should hand it off to an installed plugin to play.
There are plenty of tutorials on animating SVGs and demonstrations on the web. There are even tools for it. Even if such tools do not solve every specific issue there is nothing to prevent someone writing such a tool. If something can spit out a SWF it can spit out the corresponding SVG and JS. Quite clearly a large number of flash apps, even those involving animation could be written in HTML 5.
Do you mean 80%-90% by bandwidth, or by face time? Specifically, how many of the cartoons and games on Newgrounds.com can HTML 5 replace?
I don't really care how many animations on one particular site could work or not. The reality is that most flash files are simple clips or apps that could easily be implemented within the capabilities of HTML 5.
H.264 supplanted MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and QuickTime Sorenson and WMV somehow.
Yes by attracting industry wide support and being a codec suitable for a wide range of applications from digital cinema, broadcasting all the way down to handhelds. Ogg Theora isn't and never will be so widespread no matter how hard advocates wish it were so. Just like Ogg Vorbis it will sit on the sidelines its whole life being used by a few open source sites but little else. If Firefox doggedly refuses to allow any other codec, including industry standard ones, even when the codec is implemented by a 3rd party plugin then most sites will simply work around its deficiencies by running Flash or Silverlight or even advise visitors to use a different browser.
Well to play devil's advocate, SWF has an alternative in many cases - it's called HTML 5. Firefox is actively encouraging websites, many of which could be implemented in Ajax (possibly even HTML 5) to use a proprietary solution. There may even be SVG animation tools as you say and there certainly are numerous Ajax solutions for building GUIs, plus the canvas element, animated gifs and other bits & bobs that could easily handle 80-90% of what Flash is typically used for.
But as it happens I have no issue with the browser helping install Flash. I just wonder why it would help users install a proprietary plugin and not provide the means to use HTML 5 with *the* industry standard video codec. They can ship with Ogg Theora codec as the default and open up the video tag to other formats for other vendors to support. Keeping the tag closed is counter productive. Sites will either work around the restriction (e.g. become even more entrenched with Flash), or they'll stop supporting Firefox altogether. Ogg Theora is never in a million years going to supplant h264 any more than Vorbis supplanted MP3 and that's all there is to it.
What Mozilla and Opera are doing is trying to make it an end-user problem when it actually isn't. The end users have the codecs. Use them. Giving users the choice is far superior to steadfastly refusing to give them a choice.
It's not like Mozilla or Opera even have to include h264 (although they could utilise the codec that ships with some platforms). Both browsers support the NPAPI plugin architecture. It would be reasonably straightforward to say a video plugin must implement the NPAPI and a scripting interface such as nsIVideoPlugin. When the browser encounters a video tag with a type attribute it simply instantiates the corresponding plugin much like it does with object tags and uses the interface to control trickplay, fullscreen etc. Ogg can still be the default video plugin (never underestimate the power of the default).
Ironically and somewhat hypocritically, Firefox falls over itself to help users install a Flash plugin. It makes no sense to force sites to use Ogg because many can't or won't. Instead of encouraging sites to migrate to HTML 5, it may well make proprietary plugins even more entrenched than they are right now.
The XEL-1 is a sub-HD, 11 inch television that cost thousands of dollars. It looks pretty ugly too being the unholy marriage of a super thin display with a hulking base unit containing the technical gubbins.
I'm not surprised if its been withdrawn. It's yesterday's news as far as early adopters might be concerned and they would be the people most inclined to buy it. Besides, the state of the art has moved on and we already know LG are delivering larger, HD capable sets this year and its likely other manufacturers would have similar plans.
If all you want is a unlocked phone and eBook reader with awesome battery life, give it a try. But the article is right that it can't compare to an iPhone. The user interface sucks compared to Apple's product, especially when you move into the submenus.
Sooner or later Android is going to turn up on these things and then people will able to buy cheap and functional smartphones for practically nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
First off the latency wasn't half a second, it was estimated at 133ms even with unknown factors such as the latency of the TV, game settings and unoptimized code to consider. Second, plenty of casual or sedate games would benefit from motion sensing that tried to smooth out spikes caused by wobbly hands or whatever. Casual gamers don't need twitchy controls.
Eurogamer have already run a report with Sony techs stating precisely that. Specifically "If you want to make a more casual game, you smooth [jitter] out. It introduces latency when you smooth things but for a casual user, maybe that's a better thing. As a developer, you have control of this. If you want to make a hardcore game with precise tracking or if you want to make a more casual game, or give some help to the user you can do that." .
So games can be tuned for smoothness or twitchiness. A game like Socom for example is more interested in how the user is flicking the controller around rather than the ball on the end so perhaps smoothing is turned off and the camera sample rate dialled down to lower CPU and increase responsiveness.
Also, just because the camera is pointing at the user doesn't mean it's capturing their movements at 60fps. I imagine the sample rate is tunable depending on the kind of game being played. Some games may only "sync" with the ball every 10th of a second, others more, others less and some won't even use the camera at all. Without the positional tracking of the camera, the controller is likely to be as fast as a regular controller.
I guess all these things are tweakable and it's up to games to make the right trade off between accuracy and responsiveness depending on what kind of game they are.
The PS3 let's you plug any FAT formatted devices into the PS3 and read / write unprotected content to & from the device. You can also backup your files to a device assuming it has the space. What you can't do is use the disk for ad hoc storage of protected content except through the backup mechanism.
The MS solution appears to repartition the device. Presumably the partition will be formatted and encrypted so the 360 can read & write protected content. The advantage would be that it probably allows the device to store games and other data, but it doesn't help if you intend to use the device in other ways or to transfer content.
That may be so, but it doesn't explain why the Wii doesn't offer DVD playback even as a feature available for a nominal sum of money. Some people don't like having two devices plugged into their TV when the one they already own is more than adequate for the task.
The Conservative party have pledged to scrap them too which IMO is the sensible and good thing. Generally I agree with Labour policy but they've really lost the plot on this issue.
I don't know if Security Essentials is a good antivirus app - probably not as good as some products but a lot better than nothing so long as you don't treat it as a substitute for common sense. It's incredibly unobtrusive which is a refreshing change compared to some of the bloatware out there.
The problem with "respectable" stores like Steam is you get two doses of DRM - Steam's DRM and sometimes even more. Whether they so or not, it's still not an acceptable situation. The DRM in Steam might be relatively benign (at the moment), but it seems to work so I do not understand why publishers want to incur the expense of even more. But they do and so Steam users are rewarded with even more restrictions. Not only do Valve have you by the balls but the publisher too.
I'd add that even though Steam's DRM might be relatively benign now, but who's to say it has to stay that way? What if Valve decide they're going to start charging a buck per-download if you download a game more than 10 times, or if you want to download more than 60 days after purchase? Or if you install a game on more than 5 computers? Or premium online play? Or just any other crap they can concoct? The fact is that they are a benevolent dictator but all that could change in an instant. The tighter their grip becomes in the digital download space the more certain that changes will come and you can bet they won't all be for the good.
Yes there is. VLC is just one example of a plugin that plays h264. Furthermore many operating systems come with a h264 licence so how hard would it be to build a plugin over the platform's media libraries to play content?
Theora is a lame duck and its never going to take off and its no pretending it will. Mozilla can ship it if they want by default but they have to open up the video tag to plugins and (better yet) start using the native licence where it exists.
ActiveX as implemented in older versions of Internet Explorer was very dangerous but in its current form, it is relatively benign and certainly no worse than other plugin mechanisms. IE by default will not offer to install arbitrary objects or allow them to be scripted.
Furthermore ActiveX when used outside of Internet Explorer is just a set of APIs to implement and instantiate some object residing in a DLL or EXE using COM/DCOM. It's no more or less dangerous than the equivalent functionality to be found in other desktops, e.g. DBus, Bonobo, Kparts etc.
Also did you know that much of Mozilla is implemented as XPCOM objects which have a virtually identical lifecycle to an ActiveX component - nsISupports is analogous to IUnknown, components reside in DLLs or .js files. etc. Did you know that any add-on for Mozilla runs with chrome privileges and has the the power to instantiate any of these components and script them? There are some components in Mozilla with incredible exploit potential, components which could upload your password file to some server for example.
If don't even use IE, I suggest you worry about what your browser *does* implement rather than ActiveX.
Wow, that's a hard sentence to understand.
ActiveX is how your browser runs Flash, Silverlight, Acrobat, Java etc. through IE. So yes it has uses. And in those cases its not more or less dangerous than the equivalent NPAPI plugin. Both allow binary code to be executed (and scripted) with content supplied from an external site. The danger is that if you don't keep your plugins or controls up to date you might be vulnerable to attack.
Not necessarily. I could pipe content which I have decrypted and validated from a DRM'd container to a GPLv3 application for decoding. Alternatively I might modify the GPL app to call out to my proprietary process to decode the content for much the same effect. Nothing to stop me doing that at all. I could even supply the source of my modifications and it wouldn't necessarily help someone crack the DRM. If it was an LGPL v3 library (as most codecs are likely to be), I wouldn't even have to bother separating the DRM code and the decoder into separate processes either.
Besides which you confuse and conflate free, open standards and DRM all into one. For example h264 is an open standard but its not free (although the majority of people get it for free through a plugin or their OS, or the patent laws of their land). Additionally h264 could be bundled up in a regular mp4 or mkv container without any DRM but someone could wrap it up in DRM if they wanted. Someone could even wrap theora (a free and open standard) up with DRM if they so wished.
It is by modern computing standards, especially when the CPU is meant to be busy doing what the console is meant for which is playing games. If one core or one hardware thread is occupied 100% processing images and making sense of them, it obviously impacts on game performance.
And what do you mean by moving out onto the CPU? MS moved all the processing onto the Xbox really early on with Natal to bring retail costs down when and if this ever hits the shelves.
Exactly what I said. The original vision, the one Microsoft officially announced and stuck with for some time stated that the image and the resulting model would be produced in the device. That's quite an elegant solution and certainly minimizes on memory & CPU consumption. Now all the raw data must be transferred to the CPU which has an significant impact on accuracy, resolution, latency, sample frequency, memory and CPU availability.
At a stroke it completely changes what sort of recognition and games are viable. Natal has become a glorified EyeToy from this change. In some sense that isn't a bad thing, but I doubt it means you will see anything which is very sophisticated. In its favour Natal is obviously a cheaper and simpler solution than the Wand by a large margin and therefore it could be far more successful, or at least profitable. But from a gaming standpoint I have no doubt that the results will be pretty insipid by comparison.
I think you're right. Lots of early PS3 games made rather pointless use of the sixaxis, for example Rainbow 6 Vegas used tilt for the snakecam and it was ludicrously bad. Fortunately there are some games that use the motion sensing in reasonable ways but it has to be used judiciously and where it makes sense.
If the Move is to be successful it too must also be used judiciously and where it is used it has to be treated as a 1st class peer of the sixaxis. For example Sony is talking of using it in Socom 4. That's great but if people using the Move get their ass handed to them by people using controllers, it will suck hard. The Move has amazing potential thanks to its precision but it has to be pushed by Sony and made easy for 3rd parties too.
In terms of market share, I can well see Sony bundling up the PS3 and games with the Move. They've done it with the PS Eye and wireless headsets after all and often for quite reasonable sums. It's never going to beat out the sixaxis but they could certainly build up a large enough user base to make it worthwhile. After all, the likes of Guitar Hero, Buzz, Singstar, Wii Fit et al demonstrate you can sell millions of peripherals that only work with one game franchise so why not a controller which works with a range? Also, just the fact of offering such bundles may make some of the casual potential customers of the Wii waiver choose a PS3 instead which can hardly hurt the bottom line.
The live demos so far suggest latency and exaggerated motions are going to feature quite prominently, especially now MS are saying much of the processing is moving out onto the CPU.
A late response (I was on vacation). I like annotations since they eliminate a lot of drudgery but I still think there are occasions when XML or a separate file is a better approach, even for persistence APIs. Say for example you missed some constraint and had to fix it, it would be far easier to fix by tweaking an XML file rather than dragging in development, qa & release engineers to rebuild the application. In general though annotations is far simpler to deal with.
That assumes performance is somebody's number 1 priority. An app might use something like OpenJPA or Hibernate because code correctness, scalability, time to market or portability are more important than performance. Besides, I bet for typical database queries, the performance boost from handwriting SQL vs Hibernate (hql) / OpenJPA (jpql) generating it would be neglible. If you absolutely had to hand tune some SQL you could even slap it in a stored proc or function which is probably a good idea anyway for some actions.
If performance or a legacy database was a concern all over the place then iBatis or its ilk might be a better fit. Then you can handwrite every SQL call but at least it sits in an XML file so it doesn't pollute the application code. It's still harder to code than using a persistence API though.
Steam - now with added peer pressure!
Besides the browser doesn't have to support H264 to play H264. Firefox doesn't have built-in Flash support yet somehow manages to render Flash content. How? Because it invokes a plugin produced by Adobe to play the content. Video should be little different - if Firefox doesn't recognize the input it should hand it off to an installed plugin to play.
There are plenty of tutorials on animating SVGs and demonstrations on the web. There are even tools for it. Even if such tools do not solve every specific issue there is nothing to prevent someone writing such a tool. If something can spit out a SWF it can spit out the corresponding SVG and JS. Quite clearly a large number of flash apps, even those involving animation could be written in HTML 5.
Do you mean 80%-90% by bandwidth, or by face time? Specifically, how many of the cartoons and games on Newgrounds.com can HTML 5 replace?
I don't really care how many animations on one particular site could work or not. The reality is that most flash files are simple clips or apps that could easily be implemented within the capabilities of HTML 5.
H.264 supplanted MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and QuickTime Sorenson and WMV somehow.
Yes by attracting industry wide support and being a codec suitable for a wide range of applications from digital cinema, broadcasting all the way down to handhelds. Ogg Theora isn't and never will be so widespread no matter how hard advocates wish it were so. Just like Ogg Vorbis it will sit on the sidelines its whole life being used by a few open source sites but little else. If Firefox doggedly refuses to allow any other codec, including industry standard ones, even when the codec is implemented by a 3rd party plugin then most sites will simply work around its deficiencies by running Flash or Silverlight or even advise visitors to use a different browser.
But as it happens I have no issue with the browser helping install Flash. I just wonder why it would help users install a proprietary plugin and not provide the means to use HTML 5 with *the* industry standard video codec. They can ship with Ogg Theora codec as the default and open up the video tag to other formats for other vendors to support. Keeping the tag closed is counter productive. Sites will either work around the restriction (e.g. become even more entrenched with Flash), or they'll stop supporting Firefox altogether. Ogg Theora is never in a million years going to supplant h264 any more than Vorbis supplanted MP3 and that's all there is to it.
It's not like Mozilla or Opera even have to include h264 (although they could utilise the codec that ships with some platforms). Both browsers support the NPAPI plugin architecture. It would be reasonably straightforward to say a video plugin must implement the NPAPI and a scripting interface such as nsIVideoPlugin. When the browser encounters a video tag with a type attribute it simply instantiates the corresponding plugin much like it does with object tags and uses the interface to control trickplay, fullscreen etc. Ogg can still be the default video plugin (never underestimate the power of the default).
Ironically and somewhat hypocritically, Firefox falls over itself to help users install a Flash plugin. It makes no sense to force sites to use Ogg because many can't or won't. Instead of encouraging sites to migrate to HTML 5, it may well make proprietary plugins even more entrenched than they are right now.
I'm not surprised if its been withdrawn. It's yesterday's news as far as early adopters might be concerned and they would be the people most inclined to buy it. Besides, the state of the art has moved on and we already know LG are delivering larger, HD capable sets this year and its likely other manufacturers would have similar plans.
Sooner or later Android is going to turn up on these things and then people will able to buy cheap and functional smartphones for practically nothing.