Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
YouTube Begins Using HTML5 Instead of Flash for Default Video Playback
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Plus one for Freehand! Loved that program, more so than Adobe's Illustrator at the time... Illustrator has come a long way, but for some reason, Freehand clicked with me.
I would have to disagree with the anti creativity statement. From what I've seen, not every website was made better with flash (even ignoring the whole resource hog part). When flash websites were everywhere the strongest ones were ones that were interactive animated vector websites, and arguably the only ones still better now as flash than HTML5. The ones where flash was navigation or a photo gallery are now much better as HTML5 websites, due to Flash not handling bitmaps very well. They were good for a narrow set of screen resolutions and fell apart at a different resolution.
As for creating a website without programming knowledge, companies like Squarespace and Wix are filling in the gap, and their templates are much better than what you could cook up yourself in flash. HTML5 definitely allows for far more creativity than you give it credit for.
I wonder if this means that Youtube vids played in mobile Safari will play back 60 fps if they were uploaded that way??
----------
And Twitch?
----------
And Twitch?
I already have
Pretty much. I do have chrome but haven't installed flash itself in ages
Flash can't go away fast enough.
Beside machines that have it installed constantly notifying me of Flash updates the laptops always crank up super hot playing even low rez flash videos.
Beside machines that have it installed constantly notifying me of Flash updates the laptops always crank up super hot playing even low rez flash videos.
No need. I used to teach Flash because there was really nothing else to take its place. But now there is and it's great:
http://tumult.com/hype/
I've been disabling Flash/Plug-ins for years now. Also been using YouTube5 for years as a replacement for YouTube videos to be converted to HTML5. However, since Safari 8 on Yosemite uses HTML5 as default for YouTube, the YouTube5 extension doesn't override video playback on YouTube.com anymore. Hopefully the developers fix this soon, since I much prefer the YouTube5 version of playback.
Regardless, HTML5 by default was a long time coming and I'm glad it's finally here.
Sorry for asking a very dumb question (I'm not very tech savvy), but why is flash so intensely despised? I know it takes up lots of CPU power, thereby shortening the battery life on laptops, but is it harmful other than this? Reading through these posts makes it sound like it's seriously dangerous for machines and I'm genuinely curious why. Is it because it makes CPUs overheat?
Sorry for asking a very dumb question (I'm not very tech savvy), but why is flash so intensely despised? I know it takes up lots of CPU power, thereby shortening the battery life on laptops, but is it harmful other than this? Reading through these posts makes it sound like it's seriously dangerous for machines and I'm genuinely curious why. Is it because it makes CPUs overheat?
Resource hog, can be prone to crashes and security issues.
YouTube needed some extensions to HTML5 before moving to it as its default. Even then, it may still support Flash for old versions of browsers that many people continue to use.
The extensions were a variable-bitrate one and an encryption one. The first one is good for adjusting to different connection speeds and sets of playback hardware. The second one is good for implementing Digital Restrictions Management, er, Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Returning to Steve Jobs's famous Thoughts on Flash, I'll do a blow-by-blow analysis.
1. Openness. I'm a bit cynical about that, I must concede. But Apple has been reasonably good at embracing open online standards, at least so far and at least so it seems to me.
2. The Full Web. SJ's argument was that Flash was superfluous for playing online video. While that was mostly hypothetical back then, YouTube and others have moved that closer to reality.
3. Reliability, security, and performance.
4. Battery life.
This suggests (1) negligent management by Adobe or (2) architectural flaws in Flash that are difficult to fix.
It's worth mentioning that Flash on Android did not last long, likely for these performance reasons.
5. User interface: "Touch".
Apple had once faced a similar problem with Cocoa, whose user-interface widgets are designed for keyboards and mice. The result: Cocoa Touch. SJ was claiming that there was no good Flash analogue to Cocoa Touch's smartphone-friendly user-interface widgets. Seems like another Adobe management problem.
6. Not making full use of iOS.
That seems a bit like platform protectionism to me, though SJ did have a point about the inadequacies of app-framework middleware.
The extensions were a variable-bitrate one and an encryption one. The first one is good for adjusting to different connection speeds and sets of playback hardware. The second one is good for implementing Digital Restrictions Management, er, Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Returning to Steve Jobs's famous Thoughts on Flash, I'll do a blow-by-blow analysis.
1. Openness. I'm a bit cynical about that, I must concede. But Apple has been reasonably good at embracing open online standards, at least so far and at least so it seems to me.
2. The Full Web. SJ's argument was that Flash was superfluous for playing online video. While that was mostly hypothetical back then, YouTube and others have moved that closer to reality.
3. Reliability, security, and performance.
4. Battery life.
This suggests (1) negligent management by Adobe or (2) architectural flaws in Flash that are difficult to fix.
It's worth mentioning that Flash on Android did not last long, likely for these performance reasons.
5. User interface: "Touch".
Apple had once faced a similar problem with Cocoa, whose user-interface widgets are designed for keyboards and mice. The result: Cocoa Touch. SJ was claiming that there was no good Flash analogue to Cocoa Touch's smartphone-friendly user-interface widgets. Seems like another Adobe management problem.
6. Not making full use of iOS.
That seems a bit like platform protectionism to me, though SJ did have a point about the inadequacies of app-framework middleware.
What's next for Flash?
It gets used in a lot of online games and animations, but will the troika of HTML5-CSS-JavaScript be able to challenge it there also?
That troika supports graphics in two forms:
It also supports sound by way of HTML5.
But does it have some convenient packaging? Like putting all the assets of a production into an archive file and then transmitting that file. Flash can do that.
It gets used in a lot of online games and animations, but will the troika of HTML5-CSS-JavaScript be able to challenge it there also?
That troika supports graphics in two forms:
- Canvas -- raster
- SVG -- vector
It also supports sound by way of HTML5.
But does it have some convenient packaging? Like putting all the assets of a production into an archive file and then transmitting that file. Flash can do that.
