Hulu Sticking With Flash For Now, Says HTML5 Not Ready Yet

[BaldiMac]

If you implement HTML5 video with DRM, a plugin for this DRM system is required. The advantage of HTML5 is gone. Is that so hard to grasp?

Again, the plugin is not required! A browser can build in support for video with DRM.

The difference that you keep pointing out applies to any video not supported by the browser. It is not unique to DRM. And it has very little to do with HTML5.

 

[jettredmont]

I also pointed out that both of those companies have a history of making breaking changes without caring what it does to their user base. In both cases they have shown that they are willing to make their customers adapt to them, not adapt to their customers needs.

There is a reason that IT shops that have to support 100+ machines per full time staff member are likely to better support Windows than Mac. Apple makes too dang many breaking changes from version to version. It keeps things cleaner than keeping around legacy tech, but it is not an option in most big shops. I work for a university and we have some departments that are still using software that was last updated 10 years ago. You cannot do that if your platform has breaking changes every 9 to 18 months.

Huh. That's funny, because I have Mac software that's been around for not quite as long - 5 years since the last rev, 7 years since the last significant work - and continues to run just fine for my company. If you follow Apple's advice on how to write software (ie, use their dev tools, not a third party; use Cocoa, not Carbon; properly gestalt and support versioned shared libs; etc) software on OS X is remarkably long-lived. Note that the same is true on Windows; the Windows port of the same app has been untouched in the same time period, and continuies to run just as well today as always. Of course, it's an ugly beast next to the OS X version, and it's UI is anachronistic where the OS X version's controls have updated with the system so that it still fits in fairly well in a Snow Leopard world even though the UI was put together under Cheetah.

 

[jettredmont]

what a terrific article! i particularly enjoyed the part where they refused to acknowledge that Flash Player / Flex is an open source, published specification, which allowed the author to regurgitate the same old "Flash is closed and proprietary" argument of steve jobs.

Yeah, Flash is an open, published spec, with exactly one implementor (of any version less than three years old) and missing all the pieces (DRM, for instance) which make it a compelling solution for sites like Hulu.

IMHO, you might argue that Adobe has technically opened a significant portion of Flash, but they have left a major piece (the DRM implementation and interaction) very much a closed / proprietary spec.

BTW, saying the spec is "open source" is deceitful. There is no "source" to the standard; standards may be varying degrees of open standards. Flash is in no way "open source". There is an open source implementation of a large chunk of the Flash 8 open spec (obviously missing all the closed APIs of the spec), but that's not the same as Flash Player being open source.

 

[jettredmont]

Then you have not been keeping up. The default codec for videos on YouTube and Hulu is h.264. What you are comparing is the speed of the players, not the codec.

Well, kinda sorta. Flash is competing, as a player, with one hand tied behind its back, due to its programming model which requires off-screen compositing. This keeps Flash from using the primary video card H.264 acceleration routines (which other players who do not aim at being a full-fledged operating system can use; just send a stream to the card and tell it where on the screen to put it).

So, really, what you are comparing is the speed of a player hobbled by the whole "transparent overlays on your screen and capable of taking over everything and shooting your dog" and the speed of a player whose sole purpose in life is to Play Videos. It's no surprise that the latter tends to win in performance tests.

 

[jettredmont]

The reason Flash uses so much CPU on OS X when decoding h.264 video is because the current OS X version is not able to use hardware decoding. The next version will be able to, just like the Windows version does.

Oh. So that's why Flash 10.0 (with NO hardware acceleration on any platform) and every version of Flash since at least Flash 8 has run significantly better on Windows than on equivalent Mac hardware? So that's why Flash 10.1 on non-accelerated hardware continues to be significantly faster on Windows than on OS X?

Very interesting. At least since Apple's given Adobe an API for off-screen video acceleration of H.264, we'll see the OS X version of Flash being just as fast as the Windows version, right?

Naw. The reason Flash performance sucks on OS X is that Adobe wrote off OS X about six years ago, decided it wasn't worth their continued support, and as a result the skeleton crew of Flash/Mac devs just haven't been able to put in the performance-tuning hours necessary to get it to run well.

I don't see that changing any time soon. I also don't see Adobe as being less capricious in the platforms they support - planning development for the present market share rather tan looking forward to the future - and I for one would never want the future of my platform to hang on their whim. I'm pretty sure Jobs feels the same.

 

[jettredmont]

As I was reading this thread I was watch Hulu. I do watch it as my main video site. Yes, my fans on my MBP got loud. And there is a new glich, when I made the video full screen, the message on how to quit full screen would not go away so I had to then have the video pop out and stretch it to almost full screen.

I find it funny that it took 8 pages of comments before someone pointed out how craptacularly buggy Hulu's refresh is. They dropped features (space bar for pause, up/down arrows for volume? Nah, no one uses those!) and introduced massive bugs (the full screen text staying on, the mouse pointer not going away, and the control overlays almost never go away, a video ending in full screen and moving on to the next in the series results in everything being shoved off into a corner, a 25-30% chance that the stream will not restart after a commercial ends, 5-15 second "black screen" pauses before and/or after most commercial breaks, adaptive streaming which tends to not adapt, settings which don't "stick" between pages, "pop out" functionality which still uses the old player, but whose performance now royally sucks (slideshows every time), etc).

If the poster child for a good Flash video player team (and believe me, comparatively, this is gold!) can put out this kind of an update, you can see why Flash has such a bad name amongst users!

Which brings me to the REAL reason Hulu will not be abandoning Flash any time soon: they've put together a top-tier talent pool in Flash developers. They have no experience at all with HTML5. Even were HTML5 video to allow for DRM and usage statistics (the latter is actually already possible, and there are companies who are built to provide just that), Hulu would be the last outfit to switch. It's the golden curse of putting together a top-notch team in a particular technology; chances are, they aren't going to want to switch to a different tech.

 

[jettredmont]

80% of you is yelling about video, video, video... please trust me... using flesh for video covers maybe 1% of it's capabilities. I'm using Flash to gather the data from databases, SAP Systems and create a eye-catchy apps with it, because customers WANT IT. So abandoning Flash because HTML5 have a video tag is a big, BIG misunderstanding...

But it is the 1% of its functionality which is responsible for 80% of its ubiquity.

And, more to the point, it's that other 99% of crap in there which makes Flash a crappy video player compared to a true, single-purpose native player.

And at the end.. I simply DO NOT believe that Flash is laggy, running slow and so on, on Apple computers. NOT on my iMac i7 and on my HTC Diamond with WinMo 6.5 as well. Ok it's a little laggy on the Diamond (528Mhz processor only) And NOT on Android.. as you can see from the youtube movie I paste.

I'll set aside the controlled-environment Android "demo" (and see you with the similarly controlled-environment on-stage meltdown where the Android Flash player crashed twice, the demonstrator refused to even try Hulu, and then claimed if you wanted to see it work you could find him afterwards), my own lying eyes are why I believe that Flash is laggy and slow, especially when written by non-expert hands, and doubly-especially when run on OS X. Hulu isn't a great example of Flash instability (although this UI refresh has caused some significant usability and functional bugs, at least it hasn't crashed any of my Macs in the last two days). Meanwhile, other Flash craplets routinely do crash the Flash process. Thankfully, Safari now sandboxes Flash so all that happens is the the Flash windows go to blue legos and I need to reload the page to "enjoy" them again, but before Safari 4 I had to make sure I didn't have anything important up in Safari or Firefox before pulling up a Flash video site.

I rather think Apple do some special tricks or not holds the standards in order to slow down the Flash in their products Why... ? Because you would play Flash games o the web, you would listen Flash radio (like Pandora or GrooveShark) instead of BUYing games and music in the AppStore. Money rulezz the world, that's the true! I think the iPhone would run Flash flawlessly... especially the new one with A4 processor But.. Steve have an economic problem with it

Ummm. Okay. You may wish to pull the tinfoil hat a little further over your ears.

 

[jettredmont]

I find it funny. Of that list the 2 companies who have part of the patents on H.264 are the ones who will not support Ogg. To me that should make us all worry that their will come licensing fees in 2016. I have little faith that they will not start requiring people to pay fees to use those patents that year after they got everyone locked in.

They are bound by both how much they can raise the rates per term and how long the terms are. You wouldn't see any substantial rate increase until you get to 2030 or so, and if the license fees started going that way there's plenty of time for an alternate to develop before they can become significant.

In other words: they will not go up to any significant effect. Period.

 

[Max(IT)]

And YOUR point exactly is? That someone who dares to say anything negative about 'The Firm' should shut up? You guys must worship the ground The Great Helmsman walks on. It are just consumer products, not the cure to cancer.

The point is that this news has NOTHING to do with Apple or Steve Jobs, but you and others well-knows Apple bashers are here to speak about how Evil is SJ ....

 

[Max(IT)]

I have 3 iMacs in my office, an old white Macbook, an old Powermac, a Macbook Pro, a Unibody Macbook Pro and a Mac Pro and I've had problems with flash on nearly all of them.

Absolutely right, and who say that Flash runs flawlessly on his Mac is clearly biased against Apple just because SJ said Flash is crapware ...

 

[Anuba]

But it is the 1% of its functionality which is responsible for 80% of its ubiquity.

Flash was ubiquitous long before it had video playback capability, long before watching videos on the internet was a thing, save for thumbnail-sized RealVideo clips. Microsoft started including the Flash plugin with IE 4.0 or thereabouts, over 80% had Flash installed by the early 2000's and it's been rising ever since.

And, more to the point, it's that other 99% of crap in there which makes Flash a crappy video player compared to a true, single-purpose native player.

Crappy for you, but you don't make the content. Content providers aren't going to move from one platform that offers them DRM, advertising, vector graphics overlay etc to some single-purpose player that can only do video. "Fine I won't watch their content then, ha!" OK, watch nothing then, see how that works out.

This is the problem with this whole shoot-the-messenger thing. Flash doesn't create content, people do. Some naive pundits appear to believe in a pipe dream that if we can only make Flash go away, there'll be no more animated banners or flashy intros with a skip button. Riiiiiight. Wakey wakey. HTML5/Canvas is going to be used for the exact same things, because content providers will continue to be hell bent on creating those things, for the remainder of our lifetime and beyond. They will fight until they can do everything they did in Flash. And it's going to be much harder to avoid ads and other annoying Flash-type content once that happens. Creating "Click2Flash" is one thing, but there ain't gonna be no "Click2HTML5" – ads will be one with the content and near-impossible to filter out.

 

[KnightWRX]

Exactly. They're jumping off the boat long before it's reached the shore. Moving away from Flash might be a good long-term goal, but HTML5 isn't ready yet. Heck, they're still bickering over which video codec(s) to support – Ogg Theora, H.264, both, or neither. Just look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video

The img tag doesn't explicitly state which image format you should use in the standard either. PNG, GIF, JPG, SVG, it's all left to the browser implementor. As such, why should the video tag dictate what codec I should use ? Leave it up to the browser implementors and may the best codec win (or in reality, may whatever Microsoft choose to implement win. Hence why PNG and SVG is so scarce on the web...).

And Max(IT), please read this again :

Black or white much ?

People, stop polarizing posters. I'm not a Apple hater because I don't like their iPhone OS politics. I'm not an Apple fanboy because I like their computer hardware or OS X. I'm not a Nokia fanboy because I think they should get paid their license fees for their patents. I'm not an Apple fanboy because I think Psystar was wrong. I'm not a Google fanboy because I think Android is innovative and a great product.

People aren't "Apple bashers" because they disagree with Steve Jobs on 1 thing. I love my Mac, I love OS X, I love my iPod. Doesn't mean I have to like the App store politics, the app approvals, the rule changes or his stance on Flash and HTML5.

They will fight until they can do everything they did in Flash. And it's going to be much harder to avoid ads and other annoying Flash-type content once that happens. Creating "Click2Flash" is one thing, but there ain't gonna be no "Click2HTML5" – ads will be one with the content and near-impossible to filter out.

No, it's not. Click2HTML5 will be pretty easy to implement actually. Just block all Canvas and Video tags. When a user clicks on it, have a pop-up asking to allow or not. It's the same as with the Embed tag now and Flash. Heck, noscript does this and I wouldn't browse the web without it.

 

[Anuba]

No, it's not. Click2HTML5 will be pretty easy to implement actually. Just block all Canvas and Video tags. When a user clicks on it, have a pop-up asking to allow or not. It's the same as with the Embed tag now and Flash. Heck, noscript does this and I wouldn't browse the web without it.

Somehow I still think it won't be as easy and foolproof as blocking Flash embed tags, when the lines have been blurred. I have a feeling it will encourage a race to outsmart browsers and ad blockers, just like developers always find new ways to create popup and pop-behind windows no matter how many blocking mechanisms you have. Flash embed is Flash embed. HTML5 is a living thing...

 

[KnightWRX]

Somehow I still think it won't be as easy and foolproof as blocking Flash embed tags, when the lines have been blurred. I have a feeling it will encourage a race to outsmart browsers and ad blockers, just like developers always find new ways to create popup and pop-behind windows no matter how many blocking mechanisms you have. Flash embed is Flash embed. HTML5 is a living thing...

Canvas is a tag. It's trivial to not display it. Just don't. Same with video. Just don't display it. Heck, most browsers since Netscape 2.0 have had the "Don't display images" option which simply doesn't display the IMG tag.

You're making a mountain out of a mole hill. Sure it'll probably break sites like there's no tomorrow, but that's something you accept when you decide to browse the web with such software. I deal with it everyday with NoScript.

 

[jettredmont]

Flash was ubiquitous long before it had video playback capability, long before watching videos on the internet was a thing, save for thumbnail-sized RealVideo clips. Microsoft started including the Flash plugin with IE 4.0 or thereabouts, over 80% had Flash installed by the early 2000's and it's been rising ever since.

Hmmm. I remember that time differently, as I didn't have Flash installed until it was the lesser of the evils amongst RealPlayer et al, but your statistics may well be correct, and I see video was added in 2002 with Flash 6 while in 2000 Flash 4 was included in IE and Netscape installers. It was a dark time for the Web.

But, to the point: I honestly don't see anyone today associating Flash with anything but video in any positive way. To the majority of the people who have Flash installed (without their direct involvement, I might add), the only times they see it are on video sites and in intrusive ads. Of the two, the one they care about is the video. In fact, it's the one Adobe keeps talking about (that and Flash games, but honestly I'd rather have a "real" game than a Flash one).

As for things like car sites et al: please, provide me a link to the car you've put together in Flash so I can see it. Oh, you can't (unless the web dev jumped through some seriously non-Flash hoops)? How about have my screen reader deal with that site? How about let me increase the font size of the whole thing? How about that option for Peruvian Leather showing up in a Google search for Peruvian Leather Upholstery? Again, these types of things are only available if the Flash developer thought of them and specifically coded for them. They come by default with non-Flash sites.

There's an old quote along the lines of recreating Unix, which I'll misappropriate here: Flash developers end up needing to recreate HTML and browser features in their content, and they do it badly.

Crappy for you, but you don't make the content. Content providers aren't going to move from one platform that offers them DRM, advertising, vector graphics overlay etc to some single-purpose player that can only do video. "Fine I won't watch their content then, ha!" OK, watch nothing then, see how that works out.

Sure.

You know, audio producers would love to pollute their content with ads and intrusive swings in volume, etc, and how well does it fare there?

If you openly foster the tools used you make it easy money for them. If you make it cost something to produce an ad that can run over the top of my video then it's less likely to happen. Plain and simple.

As for choosing video content without intrusive overlays: I do that right now, and it's working fine for me, thank you. Sites that choose intrusive overlays rather than inserted ads don't get my business. And, yes, being an adult here, I could indeed go without video content if it all became highly intrusive. I really don't see full video overlay capability as a benefit to me as a consumer, nor to the ad company who has my attention because they keep blocking me from seeing what's going on in the show.

This is the problem with this whole shoot-the-messenger thing. Flash doesn't create content, people do. Some naive pundits appear to believe in a pipe dream that if we can only make Flash go away, there'll be no more animated banners or flashy intros with a skip button. Riiiiiight. Wakey wakey. HTML5/Canvas is going to be used for the exact same things, because content providers will continue to be hell bent on creating those things, for the remainder of our lifetime and beyond. They will fight until they can do everything they did in Flash. And it's going to be much harder to avoid ads and other annoying Flash-type content once that happens. Creating "Click2Flash" is one thing, but there ain't gonna be no "Click2HTML5" – ads will be one with the content and near-impossible to filter out.

This I agree with. There will be obtrusive ads in HTML5 just like there is in Flash. Whether or not Flash continues its dominance of the video world, there will be HTML5 ads, simply because the ecosystem to block them does not yet exist.

Like it or not, the Canvas will be used for evil. This is completely orthogonal to the question here, which is: should a video content site be switching over to HTML5 video (which is much harder to be obtrusive without the additional use of canvas tags, which performs better on all systems, which is even easier to code up a simple and non-crashy player)?

 

[KnightWRX]

But, to the point: I honestly don't see anyone today associating Flash with anything but video in any positive way. To the majority of the people who have Flash installed (without their direct involvement, I might add), the only times they see it are on video sites and in intrusive ads.

I guess Farmville is a myth.

Games man. They're very popular and I bet people find them very positive. There are tons of great flash games out there. Heck, I've been a lurker on newgrounds for about 10 years now. There's always new Flash stuff that's great on there.

 

[jettredmont]

I guess Farmville is a myth.

Games man. They're very popular and I bet people find them very positive. There are tons of great flash games out there. Heck, I've been a lurker on newgrounds for about 10 years now. There's always new Flash stuff that's great on there.

Touché. I guess I value my time too much to get involved with Farmville et al, but other folks apparently love it. And, yes, it's written in Flash. On the other hand, there are a dozen alternatives out there which are not in Flash, and which (generally speaking) perform much better for it. While you could rewrite a lot of Flash games in Canvas, it wouldn't be as easy as Flash makes it.

But, yes, a "real" game is less likely to be played on the locked-down corporate box at work, so Flash games are popular.

So, we have videos and games. This article is about videos (Hulu, remember?)

 

[Max(IT)]

I am sorry, but you do not know what you are talking about.

Most of the videos on YouTube and Hulu ARE h.264. Flash on Hulu was used to WRITE THE PLAYER, not encode the video.

You just proved that you don't know what the heck you are talking about.

The reason Flash uses so much CPU on OS X when decoding h.264 video is because the current OS X version is not able to use hardware decoding. The next version will be able to, just like the Windows version does.

And you don't know what are you speaking about too, since the "Gaia preview" version of Flash Player (hw accelerated) is a cpu hog. A little less than before, but it is crapware anyway ...

 

[Max(IT)]

Some of you calling Hulu a fail.. oh is that why you run to it to watch your favorite episodes?

Apple is the fail... they went with change in a wrong way... when you change... you shouldn't just cut things off... you gradually change it... Hulu isn't dumb... Apple's decision to make people choose is... oh I'm sorry... I mean Apple's decision to force spoon feed is. Yall like being force spoon fed?

BTW most of you seem to forget that Hulu is available in US only, and the World includes others countries

Hulu is not that important in the "Flash vs HTML5 battle"

 

[calsci]

Well this sure stinks.