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Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 Brings Flash Video Streaming to iOS Devices
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Good news would be seeing the web development community switch to standards compliant video... not giving them a crutch that enables them to continue doing things the wrong way. But I guess a crutch for those who won't get with the times is better than nothing. Maybe.
Well I've been using Flash since the early 2.0 or 3.0 days and seriously, aside from the listed issues with Konqueror and the early Linux builds, the only "problem" I've had is Flash content not loading (the plug-in is there and loaded and waiting on the server to send the .swf file over). I've never had it "crash" my computer that's for sure (a kernel panic due to a misbehaving userspace process ? Really...) nor have I had browsers crashing or even hanging because of it.
I guess I'm just lucky or something.
Amen! Adobe = bloated garbage. I love it when flash freezes my page so it takes 1 minute to load. I love that flash movies hang-up in the middle of a movie on my computers so I need to refresh the page or click a second ahead so it starts streaming again. I love how Photoshop etc are overpriced bloat-ware that takes 5 minutes to load and is anything but intuitive considering how long its been around.
Ahh that felt good. What's next
You both realise that streaming video is only a very small part of what Flash can do right ?
I bet the Android boys still have plenty of other advantages to their native Flash support, like you know, actually being able to play around on newgrounds or something.
Of course, but Flash's other uses are pretty replaceable. YouTube's a pretty big deal... Flash Games aren't. Anyway, HTML5 etc. provides a better alternative anyway.
Industry's moving away from flash either way, and to be honest, I'm glad... it's horrid.
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You obviously weren't a Mac user in the Flash 2.0 and 3.0 Days. Or 4, 5 or 6.0 days. Or 7.0. They were horrifically slow on even the fastest PowerPCs.
No, as I said, I was coming off Windows and moving to Linux full time in those days. At least on the Mac side you had an up-to-date build with the Windows version, we were 1 or 2 versions behind at all times and the Linux builds were the worse performance wise. Yet my Pentium II 333 didn't struggle playing content and when KDE fixed their NSAPI handler, the crashes went away.
The problem is that Canvas is still pretty new on the block and tools don't really exist for it. Unless you like writing out your own code to draw out shapes and objects from primitives (think Xlib level programming), then Canvas really isn't ready to replace Flash anytime soon.
SVG browser support is also still mostly lacking, meaning Flash's vector graphic support is still much better.
Don't get me wrong, I anticipate the day when SVG/Canvas catches up and passes by Flash, I've always been a very pro-W3C guy myself, but the reality is that it just isn't there yet.
And really, for SVG, there is just no excuse. The standard is almost a decade old. Thank Microsoft for ignoring it and making it useless all this time.
Amen! Adobe = bloated garbage. I love it when flash freezes my page so it takes 1 minute to load. I love that flash movies hang-up in the middle of a movie on my computers so I need to refresh the page or click a second ahead so it starts streaming again. I love how Photoshop etc are overpriced bloat-ware that takes 5 minutes to load and is anything but intuitive considering how long its been around.
Ahh that felt good. What's next
I would suggest a refresher course in computer science.
If you look at the history, it's not Adobe making the mistakes it's Apple.
Apple refuses to work with this company no matter what kind of olive branch they extend !
You clearly have no idea of what is really going on, so ....close your ignorant mouth !
You must be, Knight. I can't say that I've gone out of my way to test Flash or anything. All I can say is that in my experience, when I have run the occasional Flash based game, it has slowed down, stopped, hung, or generally not worked very well with a noticeably high regularity. Not that it never works, or doesn't work well sometimes. Just too often it does something stupid.
And outside of my own experience, I have seen many a tech article written about Flash being buggy/crashy/trashy/bloaty and on mobile devices, more of a battery hog than comparable technology. So I respect that your experience with it has been good. But that doesn't mean that the product is perfect. Only that it is, apparently, perfect for you. Most of these sorts of things though, have more to do with statistics than individual experience. I'm sure for many people running various hardware and performing the functions that they normally perform, Flash is fine and not buggy/crashy/trashy. For some other percentage of people with some other combination of hardware/software/usage, it is all those things. When you start to see a lot of people with the same complaints, I think it's fair to assume that there is some problem for some percentage of users. It doesn't make sense to me to try to make the argument "it works for me!" and try to say that obviously those of us who have experienced poor performance from Flash must be wrong or mistaken.
And outside of my own experience, I have seen many a tech article written about Flash being buggy/crashy/trashy/bloaty and on mobile devices, more of a battery hog than comparable technology. So I respect that your experience with it has been good. But that doesn't mean that the product is perfect. Only that it is, apparently, perfect for you. Most of these sorts of things though, have more to do with statistics than individual experience. I'm sure for many people running various hardware and performing the functions that they normally perform, Flash is fine and not buggy/crashy/trashy. For some other percentage of people with some other combination of hardware/software/usage, it is all those things. When you start to see a lot of people with the same complaints, I think it's fair to assume that there is some problem for some percentage of users. It doesn't make sense to me to try to make the argument "it works for me!" and try to say that obviously those of us who have experienced poor performance from Flash must be wrong or mistaken.
No software is perfect. Except TeX. Something you learn early and remember all your life when you have experience writing code.
Except I have yet to see the level of imperfection with Flash that some people state. You do realise that you also have to seperate the runtime bugs themselves from the content's bugs right ? There's 2 components to Flash content, the content itself, made by a developer using the Macromedia/Adobe Flash developer tools (either the Flex SDK or Flash itself) and the runtime, the Flash player you install. You might be mistaking bugs in the content for bugs with the runtime.
Amen! Adobe = bloated garbage. I love it when flash freezes my page so it takes 1 minute to load. I love that flash movies hang-up in the middle of a movie on my computers so I need to refresh the page or click a second ahead so it starts streaming again. I love how Photoshop etc are overpriced bloat-ware that takes 5 minutes to load and is anything but intuitive considering how long its been around.
Ahh that felt good. What's next
I do love me some Photoshop. If you would like a more user friendly/intuitive version, try Lightroom 3 or Photoshop Elements.
Won't dynamically transcoding each video every time it's served require a lot more resources on the server side? It seems to me that it would be much more efficient to convert all of one's video content to mp4 once and recode one's pages using HTML 5.
Hopefully this update applies to live flash video cam streaming as well. It would be great to have the option to view and broadcast on sites like cam4.com on iOS devices. Skyfire and other current alternatives don't cut it.
I'll assume you have only a Mac
Would you say it is a failure on Apple or Adobe ? ? ?
I'll give you a few minutes to think of an answer.
BTW,...............Running smooth on any Windows Rig.
It's ok .....go ahead "Google" and Apple and Adobe
Depends what your servers would be doing otherwise. If you're strapped for storage but your RAM/CPUs are sitting idle, then transcode away. If your CPU is already choked or close to and you're close to paging in/out but have plenty of free disk space, convert manually yourself.
It's not a black or white answer.
This is a server side update, not a client side update.
Or try Seashore, a completely free native-OS X implementation of the GIMP with all the functionality any lay person will need. I don't mis Photoshop CS at all.
Oh, come on. You're just being silly. I'm talking about at most a doubling of storage space, whereas resources used by dynamic transcoding are going to grow exponentially with number of viewers. We're talking about an enterprise solution here, one that needs to be scalable.
I take it that being rude about people is only okay as long as they are insulting Apple?
I am ? I thought I was being myself, a system administrator who would study current infrastructure, growth potential and best decide which solution fits best based on my forecasts and current established situation.
Seriously, I have servers where adding more storage is not even an option (think Sun boxes that lack their 2nd controller, which would require massive purchases to have shipped and installed, and lack Fiber channel connections because I don't want DMZ boxes sitting on the same SAN as my intranet boxes) but are not really straining in the CPU department. On the other side of the fence, I have SAN connected VMs that are sitting 30:1 on the Guest/Host ratio where storage is a few clicks away, but the shared nature of the 24 core ESX boxes means that CPU power needs to be kept on the down low.
I'm also talking about enterprise solutions. Again, it depends on what your current infrastructure is, how it can best scale, what your forecasts are as far as growth and ressource utilization are, etc...
Again, not a black or white scenario and it's nice of Adobe to provide the option.
How do I configure even Flash-capable devices to get the "repackaged" content without "the processor degradation and battery life cost"?
KnightWRX is an Adobe fanboy, he's been "repackaging" Adobe's talking points since he's been here.
It really surprises me you've never seen this. That doesn't mean crashed browsers, and certainly not a modern OS.
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Traditionally, that is how it works here.
Nope, never seen that. Like I've said, I've seen plenty of these back in the old days but that was more a KDE bug than a Flash bug :
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Why am I an Adobe fanboy ? I'm not even a Flash developer, only a Flash user that for some reason doesn't have as much trouble with the player that other people seem to have.
Seriously, why does it always have to be hater/fanboy around here ? Why can't we all just be technology users.
God I hate this polarizing. Fanboy this, Hater that. It gets tiring.
Heck, we weren't even discussing Adobe, we were discussing the merits of live transcoding vs manually transcoding.
So you're defending the use of Flash on mobile devices by comparing it to your limited experience, and in the same sentence admitting you wasted money on something you don't even use. Thanks, I'll look elsewhere for wisdom...