Flash embraces Google's open video codec
Adobe has rolled out an HTML5 development kit and announced that Flash will use Google's freshly open sourced VP8 video codec. The company wants you to know that despite its tussle with Steve Jobs, it very much believes in web standards. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch unveiled the new HTML5 Pack - an extension to Adobe's existing HTML …
"Adobe says its HTML5 Pack extension includes new code hinting for HTML5 and CSS3 that allows Dreamweaver users to "easily" make use of new HTML5 tags"
riiiight
on at least one front. I am not against the man per say (a conservative) but open source code stops government snooping on us, aka NSA/Microsoft & Vista/7. The open source code will make sure we are not back doored, per say.
I've been around and was in the military when I bought my Vic 20, then came Commodore 64 and a 128, Amiga, 386 machine at 25MHz with a overpowered video card with 1Mb of RAM, and so on.
Long Live Linux
If you must use the phrase "per se" so often, you might as well spell it right. Thanks.
+1 on the title.
And the rest.
Where's the LOL icon?
... and how about actually using it appropriately, as well as spelling it correctly?
For english readers, "per se" will automatically mean "in itself" or "of itself". if "itself" refers to the man, perhaps what was really meant by the man was "the man" meaning an abstract oppressive authority. Or perhaps it was meant to refer to Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch who would be "himself". Those of us brought up on Kennedy's Latin Primer (see para 92b), can retranslate "per se" as "through himself" and perhaps alter that to "in himself" to make sense of it - if there is any.
I can make no sense at all of the second use of "per say".
sorry - slow morning
references:
Latin:
The Revised Latin Primer / Benjamin Hall Kennedy DD
clarity of style:
The Old Man and the Sea / Ernest Hemingway
Apple is getting a good beat down from all fronts. That's what happens when you run your mouth Mr Jobs. Open standards, video acceleration, etc, AND Adobe now jumping in to the fray as well. Good job my dear sirs...
Apple says that they don't want Flash on their portable hardware. They say that what they do want is HTML5 and hardware accelerated video. Adobe decide to support HTML5 and VP8 in Dreamweaver so Apple are now getting "a good bet down"? Other than needing hardware decode for VP8 (which Google are promising) how is this going against Apple's position?
Adobe seems to be clutching at straws now, positioning Flash as a wrapper for standards-based content - and what is the point of a wrapper that only risks making everything slower and crash-prone? Why not just stream and play h264 or VP8 or whatever?
Adobe, please stop flogging this dead horse.
At least, that's what Adobe's take is.
Apple will no doubt adopt VP8 support sooner than you think. They can't afford not to; they don't have the market share to be that picky.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has it's own stake in H.264, so they will no doubt stubbornly try to force it on us as an "industry standard"... They are Microsoft, after all. -- However, if Mozilla, Google and Opera (and perhaps Apple, if they come to their senses) stick together, they might well wear Microsoft down. If a majority of the video content out there is in VP8 format, Microsoft can't not adopt it.
And once the web-development community realizes Microsoft has a stake in H.264, and anybody who is not publishing non-commercial content needs to pay a royalty fee (or at least that is how I understood the license), they will no doubt rebel against it. - There is only so far Microsoft can push us before we snap!
Until the hashed ass backwards mess that is the Canvas tag, actually works, Flash has a long long life to live in delivering pixel-accurate 2D (and psuedo 3D) rich content.
Believing that HTML5 picks up from where Flash is now, or is some sort of Flash killer, is like believing that Microsoft Paint is a Photoshop killer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg
@Atli
While I understand the principle of your argument, it relies on enough key members against the H264 standard.
In particular, Apple is not only a member of the MPEG-LA H.264/MPEG-4 AVC patent pool and therefore a licensor as much as Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA), but in addition have a large vested interest in it since they have already heavily invested in optimising their software and hardware for H264. In fact, as far as they are concerned it is "The New Industry Standard" (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/).
So, I'd be shocked if Apple is either an early adopter of VP8 or ever invest more than token support into it if they do.
Drawing a nice GUI around the VP8 video. It's far more than a wrapper.
MS have said IE9 will support VP8, although they won't ship it with IE9. So once the codec is installed it will run fine regardless if it's VP8 or H.264 encoded HTML or Flash...
Additionally MPEG LA has Apple as well as MS as stakeholders.
You know Flash does more than video right?
I was probably doing AJaX-alike stuff in Flash before AJaX was even coined as a term - Flash can read in XML and HTML and build your menus and content from them so, even before AIR, you could dynamically create Flash content from your database and therefore your CMS system.
Alternatively, you can use flat XML files as a kind of database snapshot and use Flash as a parser. This has meant that, for years, I've been able to have my entire portfolio wrapped in a funky looking little Flash front-end whilst the content itself is updated by just altering the relevant XML files (a database dump essentially) and images - burn it onto a disk (or chuck it on a pen drive) and you've got a nice way to present your portfolio.
Flash isn't prefect, far from it, but it does work as a good (cross platform - sort of - excepting iP*d) development tool for nifty little apps and browser games *shrugs*
got to do with this - got to do with this? What's MS, but a second hand company (per Apple lovers).
Back to your post. Er, Apple DOES have a stake in this, more so than Microsoft as it IS their codec.....
@tas. Good point about Apples interest in the H.264 code. I may well have underestimated Apple's (un)willingness to adopt VP8 - It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this. They will probably mirror what Microsoft does. (If IE includes VP8, Safari can't ignore it, but if IE doesn't include it, that might push things far enough in H.264's favor so they can ignore the alternatives.)
@The Original Steve. You wouldn't happen to have a reference to that? I would very much like to read more about it. -- I'm Googling it as we speak! (Using Bling, given the topic xD)
I'm not going to buy Dreamweaver because of the price (and not needing it). But just because HTML5 can do video does not mean it's a Flash replacement.
Most notably: there are Flash applications such as zoomify.com that let you create zoomable/expandable pictures in the style of Google Earth, whereby the flash code dynamically fetches only those zoomed-in tiles that it needs, depending on where you zoom to. Sure, you *could* maybe write this in a ton of Javascript. But not easily. But the main point is that you certainly *can't* do this as a H.264 or VP8 video, because it's interactive. It's also not a good fit for "download an app to your phone" because people may just want to put this on a website.
Now, if Adobe is pushing Flash for pure video then this seems dubious, except possibly for minor details such as resolution negotiation. Probably, though, they are aiming at people who either (a) want to use some of Flash's non-video features or (b) already have Dreamweaver.
None of this means I don't use FlashBlock, but Flash != video only.
How much does a single expression weigh?
Since you're already doing the major tile processing on the server*, I can see a good programmer using maybe 100 lines of JS to do what zoomify does. MAYBE 100 lines. If the programmer had a headache and couldn't think straight.
* 'cos if you're dynamically fetching the tiles, you have to have a server dynamically producing the tiles.
""Sure, you *could* maybe write this in a ton of Javascript. But not easily.""
JavaScript and Actionscript aren't actually all that different (Actionscript was originally based on JavaScript, if I am not mistaken). And now that we have the canvas element, writing applications like those you just mentioned won't be all that different from writing flash apps. -- The only real difference is that we don't, yet, have an equivalent GUI to set up canvas elements, like the Flash application. (They can of course be done programmatically, which some of us actually prefer.)
I've already tried some basic stuff, which until the canvas element was only ever realistically possible in Flash (or that Microsoft Flash wannabe thing, can't remember what it was called), and I found it pretty good. It would certainly be possible to replicate most Flash apps using it, and once the technology is properly defined, it may even be preferable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the HTML5 standards are a match for flash at it's current stage of development, but in a year or two, once it has been properly defined, I have no doubt HTML5+CSS3+JavaScript will far outstrip the capabilities of Flash.
Yes you might be able to get Chrome and FF to work and run smoothly in your 'maybe 100 lines', but to get it to do the same in 3 versions of IE - good luck!
On the other hand, there is probably a JQuery equivelent that will do it all, cross browser, in 10-15 lines, but then you have the bloat of the framework.
Swings and rounderbouts.
So you can't do this without a ton (should that be 'tonne' ??) of JavaScript, but you can do it easily with Flash, which is powered by an ActionScript engine that is something like 90% the same thing? Don't think that argument quite works, particularly since the really hard work is done by the back-end server that has to produce the images.
@EveryoneElse
Flash is not the same thing as Dreamweaver, by a country mile, DreamWeaver has always been an HTML editor, an is of no use at all for producing Flash. Different business units, with different agendas.
""On the other hand, there is probably a JQuery equivelent that will do it all, cross browser, in 10-15 lines, but then you have the bloat of the framework.""
Sure, lest avoid "bloating" the script engine with a few KiBs of code by using a 3rd party, proprietary, resource abusing, bug ridden browser plug-in that only really works correctly on a single OS.
A swing and a miss.
Finally someone making some sense in this debate.
Getting tired of hearing about HTML5 and these discussions that treat the debate as if the only reason Flash dominates the web is VIDEO.
I can understand the apprehension about FLASH on mobile phones and like everyone else I get annoyed with the over abundance of stupid flash intros on sites. But I will wait until I start seeing sites like starfall.com, implemented in HTML5 before I jump on the HTML5 bandwagon.
Since FLASH on the web is so much more than VIDEO I suspect that it will retain its dominant position on the web for a very long time.
P.S. Given the dominance of FLASH on the WEB today no device, phone or otherwise, can be considered as providing great user experience if it does not support flash. For this reason the AXE Steve is Grinding is little to do about FLASH and lot to do about his company's bottom line. Love OR HATE FLASH, your head must be stuck in a hole (IN THE GROUND) if you think otherwise.
HTML5 is more than just video too. Canvas, local storage, vector graphics primitives, pretty much all the stuff flash was doing. Just to show what's possible, Google has implemented Quake II in HTML5. Steven Jobs or no Steve Jobs, slowly but surely Flash is being superseded.
...long live flash! annoyingly Jobs is right. it is a load of crap - -but sadly it's not going anywhere soon
Despite it's current crappyness, Flash has done some amazing things for the web. It allowed us to stream video and audio well before the standards allowed for such things, not to mention the programmable graphics that, until now, were impossible to accomplish with what the web standards had to offer.
I would of course much prefer standard technologies over the proprietary, bug-ridden 3rd party plug-in that is the Flash player... But let's not forget what Flash has done for us.
Jobs may be right to want to replace it with HTML5, but I doubt his banning it from the iDevices has much to do with that. More likely, that was what he and his world-class marketing strategists came up with to excuse the ban. -- Apple has always been a pretty closed off system, but it's getting to be a bit extreme lately. Their lock-in techniques have become way to aggressive, and the Flash ban is just a part of that. I don't doubt that Jobs would only be to happy to ban the HTML5 media technologies as well, but I suspect he knows that would be going to far. -- He want's to control every aspect of the way his iDevices are used, and he is well on his way to accomplish that. (Which is a bad thing, if you were wondering.)
I'm really looking forward to a good clean open source codec being hampered by memory leaks and infinite loops from dreamdamper produced 'flash'.
For a moment there it looked as if I'd get to use the CPU on my computer but Adobe has graciously offered to remove that onerous responsibility from me.
Remember that Flash was originally Macromedia Flash. Adobe has made it progressively more open and standards-based with every post-Macromedia version. The SWF file is well documented. ActionScript 2 and 3 are well-documented and standardized. AS3 is even ECMAScript compliant. Now the save format for Flash CS5 is an XML file rather than a memory dump.
Adobe is the same company that took pretty standard PostScript and embedded fonts and images into the file to make PDF, for which they have always published the file specs. OS X's main graphics output is based on PDF. How's that for open?
Adobe maintains that their authoring applications are where the money is. After all, their Flash Player is free and has clones (which are made that much better by them opening the file format). You can make Flash with the HaXe programming language. You can make Flash with Namo FreeMotion. You can make Flash with any number of open-source tools and any number of specialized single-purpose $10 commercial titles (just for banners, just for photo galleries, just for animation, etc.).
You can use other tools even more easily for what their other products do. PhotoShop is an image editor. After Effects is a film postproduction package. InDesign is for desktop publishing. Illustrator is for graphic design and layout. Hell, how many HTML editors are there to compete with DreamWeaver? Almost any office suite can output to PDF. Yet their applications sell for hundreds of dollars and the suites of them for a couple thousand.
Yeah, they really need a closed format, like JPEG for PhotoShop or XHTML for DreamWeaver. Give me a break.
Oh, and the next time I read that Flash is nothing but video, please let it be a joke and not some misinformed "We only just now Evolved to use the internet 2.0 years ago" Web2.0 drivel. Try getting a plain vanilla video container to present Bow Man, Portal: The Flash Version, anything from the Protector series (or anything from Kongregate at all), any of the interactive Flash software tutorials, interactive Flash sales brochures, the media players on sites like MySpace, or flashcard systems for kids in school. Make Matroska or H.264 by themselves do anything else that requires user interaction, conditional branches, handling of multiple input files, and real-time animation.
Flash Player (or Gnash, or SWFDec) is a VM with libraries and a graphics system built in. It is not just a codec, and in fact it already supported multiple video codecs, containers, and compression schemes before all of this publicity -- including VP6 from On2! Support for VP8 probably would have happened even if Google hadn't bought On2.
I really wish you people who know nothing of how programming, web design, media production, and graphic design are done would just go back to playing with your cool toys and leave the bitching and moaning about formats, containers, codecs, languages, authoring tools, and playback VMs
Thumbs up wasnt enough.
I didn't know Flash CS5 saved as XML. Is this actually MXML and AS in a file that can then be opened in Flash Builder? Totally off topic i know, but interesting none the less.
And I wish you people who THINK you know about programming, web design, media production and graphic design would just FOAD and stop converting our otherwise powerful computers into bloated sluggish portals for a myriad trojans and other assorted malware.
If flash was more than just video, how come I've never come across a site that requires me to download it except for ones that want to show me a video.
What the hell is all this Bow Man, Protextor and Kongregate shit anyway? Don't bother telling me, I've been using the net for 17 years now without ever hearing of these, so I'm sure I can happily live without them.
More like "I've been using the email and surfing porn for 17 years now without ever hearing of these, so I'm sure I can happily live without them."
Because basically, you killed your own argument. You've been using the net. Some of us have been building it.
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1986
It's essentially a folder with all your project's materials in it. Adobe calls it the XFL format. There's an XML serialization of the Flash DOM including timelines and motion paths along with a couple of settings files also in XML. Then there are the resource files for everything like graphics, video, sound, and such in a library sub-folder. ActionScript source files go at the same directory level as the project folder rather than in it, though. That may turn out to be a hassle.
Adobe's really excited about letting people use standard text tools to edit the files, like your favorite editor or an automated search and replace. In fact, the FLA format for Flash Pro CS5 is still available, but it's now just a zipped version of the XFL project folder.
Let's see Apple make QuickTime or GarageBand so easy to use with external tools, huh?
Spot the idea below that is not like the others:
"I've never been to India. I don't believe it exists. I think it's just someplace made up so people can get away with funny accents."
"I've used the net for seventeen years and I've never seen Flash used for anything other than linear video playback. It must not be capable of anything else. Those of you with jobs in the field and portfolios of work that use your real names should all FOAD because I know everything that exists in MY world."
"Recorded music started with the CD, and now we use iPods. What do you mean cassette? What's a record? Is that like a recording? I think you're pulling my leg. Vinyl? You mean like mommy's favorite bra?"
"The problem with the gold standard is I can't see the gold. If I can't see the gold, money tied to it is worthless paper. Floating currency has real, intrinsic value, because that's what mommy gives me to buy my Lady Gaga tracks on iTunes."
"Gee, you mean there's a powerful virtual machine that's often used just for video playback? I hadn't really considered that. Thanks. I'll look into that so I can make an informed statement next time."
"Cupertino cult" Oh please. Apple is a business, and nobody, repeat nobody, is forced to buy anything from them that they don't want, OK?
As for Adobe, why haven't they produced a single working mobile Flash plug-in yet? Even on Android there is nothing after two years - nothing.
If it is all Apple's fault for banning Flash content in Safari, why not produce a working player/plug-in for jailbroken phones to prove how great Flash really is on iphones? Go on, prove that it is not a battery draining resource hog once and for all, please. Then we can all move on...
I have Flash on my HTC Desire @ Android 2.1, works quite nicely too...i'm pretty sure that counts as a working plug-in.
Also Flash 10.1 is going to be included in Android 2.2, it's been demoed and will play the vast majority of flash content.
Also i wouldn't say it's more of a resource hog than the youtube app or your average game, it's hadrware accelerated video...of course it's going to use your battery more. And you're right, Apple is a business, which is why they don't want Flash as it'll hit their bottom line in app store sales, not for any other reason.
Okay so they don't force us to buy their products ...yet.
I bet if BlowJobs could make it an Apple world with him as emperor, he would.
So would Gates, Ellison, or the dorks at Google. That's the type of guys who runs the major multi-national corporations in the world, Greedy powermad ones.
With Quicktime, ITunes, and even the plugs on their devices, Apply very much does try to force anyone who wants one of their products to have to buy all of their products. (Obviously not all things they make, but if you buy ipod you need ipod speakers, headphones etc that are Apple only.) Their recent strong handedness on the iphone and ipad show even more truth in how they prefer to operate.
More so, there is a seemingly knee-jerk wounded reaction that most Apple advocates seem to espouse that is very familiar with other cults, and organizations that have membership based on feelings and opinion, rather than careful analysis of the facts and situation at hand.
Most businesses could not get away with the unexplained restrictions and shepherding that Apple seems to be able to get away with. For those of us observing from outside the situation
You can't come back at me with slanders against my cult, as I don't let myself behave that way.
M$, Linux, Google, are all also cults to some degree, in that people put faith in their philosophy not just purchase their products. I was a huge advocate of Sun for example, but as the directors mismanaged the company into the ground, you can either blindly cling to the faith and beliefs you have, or you can continue to examine reality and come to terms with the facts that something that was once positive, maybe no longer is.
Message to all cult members:
Apple, Google, M$ etc NONE of these companies is going to show us the way to the future, how to live happy lives, or how to solve any real meaningful problems. They are clever companies that make useful tools, its time we step up and become more responsible for being self educated, self responsible, and independent and critical thinkers.
You can say that you don't subscribe to the Apple Cult, but to say it does not exist makes you sound like a nutter cult member.
", why haven't they produced a single working mobile Flash plug-in yet?"
Please explain...Flash seems to work fine on the web with my Palm phone, and what did Apple ban if there was no Flash to ban in the first place?
And I don't have the time to go into how moronically stupid someone could be to believe in some of the stories behing modern cults like the Mormons and Scatologists (Scientologists).
Anyone who believes the Steve Jobs lies that Apple care about open web standards needs to take another look at Apple's movie trailers website:
http://www.pretentiousname.com/temp/joined_up_thinking.png
Jobs lied about hating music DRM and he's lying about wanting open formats and to free us from proprietary plug-ins.
Strange I thought Google was putting its money behind Theora, I'm sure that didn't cost them $124m, or did it Robin?
