First off the title of the article is ridiculous. Google does not fight flash. Google develops ActionScript APIs and uses flash for some of their projects.
Second of all Adobe did not drop the ball optimizing flash player on mac os x- it's Apple freak control that does not allow/provide hooks to hardware acceleration for third party apps.
Thirdly - popups can be created with HTML and disabling flash will do nothing from blocking popups - use a popup blocker provided in your browser.
In general QuickTime is not that great. it does not work well with buffering. HTML 5 video does not provide a half of the functionality available in flash.
You Flash-Haters are such a joke.....I read all the comments and I just laugh at you guys. "OMG, Flash uses 90% of my battery and my laptop is not even on"...lol. You guys pathetically throw around the new buzz word "html 5" as if you know what its all about. Here's one for you, "Joomla".....start throwing that around and your friends will see the books at Borders and think you're a smart guy. Just relax, sit back, and watch the web continue to grow and have fun. The Flash development tools are incredible, but the plug-in is just a burden. Adobe knows this, they will go open source, they need to. html 5 is fantastic, but developing for it is incredibly time consuming compared to Flash, if good tools are not available for the masses like the Flash SDK, it will die. The magic in all the great things we see are in the power and ease of the SDKs for the developer's (I'm still laughing about a Kindle SDK, but hey, somebody will probably buy my Blackjack game"
First off the title of the article is ridiculous. Google does not fight flash. Google develops ActionScript APIs and uses flash for some of their projects.
I agree the title is purposefully sensationalist. Google is using flash because that was the best tool available at the time to accomplish the job. But Google has clearly stated it wants all of its services to be standards based. Google is replacing flash elements with HTML5 elements as the tools become available.
Quote:
Second of all Adobe did not drop the ball optimizing flash player on mac os x- it's Apple freak control that does not allow/provide hooks to hardware acceleration for third party apps.
What hardware acceleration are you talking about?
Quote:
In general QuickTime is not that great. it does not work well with buffering. HTML 5 video does not provide a half of the functionality available in flash.
HTML5 video tags don't use Quicktime, that is the point of it. HTML5 video plays in the browser with no need for any media plug in.
Right now HTML5 video cannot provide the functionality of flash because its brand new. But it will quickly catch up.
The Flash development tools are incredible, but the plug-in is just a burden.
It's well-known that the plug-in sucks, particularly on Safari where it uses the Netscape API. As a non-Flash developer, why should I care about the quality of the development tools? And as a developer, shouldn't you be more concerned about the user experience?
It's well-known that the plug-in sucks, particularly on Safari where it uses the Netscape API. As a non-Flash developer, why should I care about the quality of the development tools? And as a developer, shouldn't you be more concerned about the user experience?
Of course, the user experience is King. However, an artist who has been commissioned for a painting wants a great canvas, good brushes and a great selection of paint to create his masterpiece. As an example, the iPhone SDK is a brilliantly simple yet extremely robust set of development tools....Palms Mojo SDK......eh.......as Balmer says, "Developers, developers developers"......the developers go where the good tools are, thus, iPhone app development is flourishing while other great even superior phones are failing because of poor SDKs. Don't fool yourself into thinking that a great software technology dependant on developers will survive if the SDK sucks.
Of course, the user experience is King. However, an artist who has been commissioned for a painting wants a great canvas, good brushes and a great selection of paint to create his masterpiece. As an example, the iPhone SDK is a brilliantly simple yet extremely robust set of development tools....Palms Mojo SDK......eh.......as Balmer says, "Developers, developers developers"......the developers go where the good tools are, thus, iPhone app development is flourishing while other great even superior phones are failing because of poor SDKs. Don't fool yourself into thinking that a great software technology dependant on developers will survive if the SDK sucks.
It sounds like you are comparing building an interactive Flash site to the equilivent site in HTML/CSS/JS. Of course Flash I better for that, but this is about streaming video in a more efficient manner. HTML5 allows that with ease. The only caveat is some additional required to get ads and additional features to the video, but the benefits far outweigh any cons which is why you'll see this become increasing popular for delivering video.
This is my final comment on the subject. We all know why people hate Flash. They say it is about the battery life or CPU usage, but that is just a smoke screen. 'Fess up it's the ads. So be careful what you wish for because as soon as the HTML5 ads start showing you won't be able to block them unless you turn off all images and sound. At least with Flash we have Flash Blocker and Click to Flash.
This is my final comment on the subject. We all know why people hate Flash. They say it is about the battery life or CPU usage, but that is just a smoke screen. 'Fess up it's the ads. So be careful what you wish for because as soon as the HTML5 ads start showing you won't be able to block them unless you turn off all images and sound. At least with Flash we have Flash Blocker and Click to Flash.
It Is about CPU usage. Before installing Click4Flash not only was the CPU peaking out but my fans were constantly running and Safari was crashing at least once a day. With Click4Flash Safari is very stable, CPU usage is way down and the only crashes I get are Flash Plug-in crashes.
I am not a developer and have no ax to grind for one developer environment over another. I just want a stable system. Flash content as currently being delivered does not provide this.
It Is about CPU usage. Before installing Click4Flash not only was the CPU peaking out but my fans were constantly running and Safari was crashing at least once a day. With Click4Flash Safari is very stable, CPU usage is way down and the only crashes I get are Flash Plug-in crashes.
I am not a developer and have no ax to grind for one developer environment over another. I just want a stable system. Flash content as currently being delivered does not provide this.
I agree, ClickToFlash is great. HTML5 video tags are great. Even in this beta with limited controls it still rocks when comparing performance usage.
But Mstone does make a great point. Now, we can easily remove Flash from our pages but as HMTL5 elements and CSS Animations become more prevalent and easy to code they will make their way to our ads and they will be harder to remove. Instead of just disabling Flash we’ll need a more intelligent system for figuring out and determining the ad placement.
The first argument is that we will save resources without Flash so I won’t care about interactive ads with HTML/CSS/JS, but that isn’t necessarily true. Just check out the examples below with Activity Monitor Open to see what I’m talking about. The only saving grace is that this is now, and with WebGL and HTML5 still being new tech, hopefully this will hopefully be minimal processing in the future…
Another future potential problem is having ads access WebGL. I don’t wan’t any ad being able to suck resources from GPU just to run some ad I don’t care about. Still, with Flash as the only option being so bad for the enduser I’m all for HTML5, especially for video.
PS: Handbrake stopped supporting AVI/DivX/XviD. It’s about fricken time!
Second of all Adobe did not drop the ball optimizing flash player on mac os x- it's Apple freak control that does not allow/provide hooks to hardware acceleration for third party apps.
I wish people would include some evidence to support the posts. Something, anything at all that helps back up their statement.
I wish people would include some evidence to support the posts. Something, anything at all that helps back up their statement.
Allow me
"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases."
"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases."
Disclaimer: I have no idea if Adobe's claim is true or not. There's some informed-sounding discussion of the issue here.
Interesting. Thanks for the post. I’ll have to read the forum discussion on it later, but off the top of my head if other apps can use the H.264 acceleration and the GPU, even WebGL, then I don’t see why Adobe with all it’s other apps that seem to use the GPU can’t figure out how to make Flash HW accelerated on Mac OS X.
edit: From that link…
Quote:
Originally Posted by NETknightX on ArsTechnia
QuickTime API is too high level for Adobe. It's almost basically, "here is a file, play it". I think they want access to the lower level APIs so they can directly pass in the bitstream or buffers and have more control.
It's currently something like this for QuickTime X:
QuickTime X => QuickTime API => Apple VA framework => PureVideo (driver) => H/W
The Apple VA framework is currently a private framework, so Adobe can't access it.
On Windows, Adobe uses DXVA for Flash, which is on the AppleVA level. Ex. WMP/MediaCenter:
That sounds like a reasonable and valid explanation. That clearly does put a fair amount of the blame into Apple’s court, though it doesn’t excuse the general overall crappiness that is Flash on Mac OS X.
I am not a developer and have no ax to grind for one developer environment over another. I just want a stable system. Flash content as currently being delivered does not provide this.
Ok I lied. I can't resist. One last remark.
See, you nailed it on the the head. "Flash Content" is the problem. Poorly coded applications are the main problem with resource usage, memory leaks, etc. ultimately causing crashes. However properly coded applications run fine. So it is a case of killing the messenger, Flash, when instead it is the programmer who is at fault. Actually the title of programmer is giving many way too much credit.
The more you learn about Actionscript, the easier it is to understand why Flash can be problematic for CPU and memory usage. Flash is a highly versatile programming environment but that versatility comes at a cost. When you are watching a video in Flash you are actually launching dozens of movies within Flash. Every button, counter, slider, etc. is its own movie with a timeline and event listeners constantly refreshing at 24 frames a second. Not just the video itself but dozens of other threads are being used. Quite inefficient to say the least. That is because Flash is not just a dedicated video player. It can do anything. Connect to databases, use web services, upload pictures, play music, plot GIS maps and just about anything else you can imagine.
Unlike an application that is programmed in a lower level language like C, Flash is a scripting language. This is what makes it so easy to code and highly versatile. So I totally agree that there should be a very small dedicated standardized video player, since it would not require the huge overhead that Flash requires in order to do the multitude of other functions that it can do.
Unfortunately that standardization requires cooperation among the various big players which up until now has not happened, hence Flash was the only option available for universal video streaming. Clearly not the best solution but the only one available to 90% of the installed base.
The other thing that eats up resources is graphics. Moving vector graphics across the screen takes a lot of computing power. In Flash it is no different than in a 3D video game. That is just the laws of physics so to speak. So if you are watching a graphically intense Flash page, there is going to be some heat being generated.
Flash can be problematic for CPU and memory usage.
You've changed your tune
To be fair, so can Javascript. I just looked at a Spectrum (80s home computer) emulator - extraordinary that you can do this stuff in JS - that boosted my Safari CPU usage to 40%. And Safari itself loves to eat up RAM...
I reckon the Chrome page-sandboxing approach is the way to go.
The situation is obviously complex. The Flash programmer has to do the right thing, but so does the plugin, the web browser, the OS and the graphics driver. The more that stack is based on open standards, the less often, one would hope, that a web page will bring a state-of-the-art system to its knees.
The problem is also social and economic: there are numerous large companies; certain egoistical CEOs; and proprietary, heavily patent-encumbered software and hardware standing between the developer and the user, even assuming the developer knows to do the right thing.
Comments
Second of all Adobe did not drop the ball optimizing flash player on mac os x- it's Apple freak control that does not allow/provide hooks to hardware acceleration for third party apps.
Thirdly - popups can be created with HTML and disabling flash will do nothing from blocking popups - use a popup blocker provided in your browser.
In general QuickTime is not that great. it does not work well with buffering. HTML 5 video does not provide a half of the functionality available in flash.
First off the title of the article is ridiculous. Google does not fight flash. Google develops ActionScript APIs and uses flash for some of their projects.
I agree the title is purposefully sensationalist. Google is using flash because that was the best tool available at the time to accomplish the job. But Google has clearly stated it wants all of its services to be standards based. Google is replacing flash elements with HTML5 elements as the tools become available.
Second of all Adobe did not drop the ball optimizing flash player on mac os x- it's Apple freak control that does not allow/provide hooks to hardware acceleration for third party apps.
What hardware acceleration are you talking about?
In general QuickTime is not that great. it does not work well with buffering. HTML 5 video does not provide a half of the functionality available in flash.
HTML5 video tags don't use Quicktime, that is the point of it. HTML5 video plays in the browser with no need for any media plug in.
Right now HTML5 video cannot provide the functionality of flash because its brand new. But it will quickly catch up.
The Flash development tools are incredible, but the plug-in is just a burden.
It's well-known that the plug-in sucks, particularly on Safari where it uses the Netscape API. As a non-Flash developer, why should I care about the quality of the development tools? And as a developer, shouldn't you be more concerned about the user experience?
Anything that rids the world and the Internet of Flash is a good thing.
- HTML5 - CPU temperature increased 2-3C
- FLASH - CPU temperature increased 8-10C
If i could only have an option to download these H.264 videoclips - never back to FLASH (on my Safari browser FLASH is only on demand, anyway)!?
MacBook Pro, early 2009, 2.93GHz
It's well-known that the plug-in sucks, particularly on Safari where it uses the Netscape API. As a non-Flash developer, why should I care about the quality of the development tools? And as a developer, shouldn't you be more concerned about the user experience?
Of course, the user experience is King. However, an artist who has been commissioned for a painting wants a great canvas, good brushes and a great selection of paint to create his masterpiece. As an example, the iPhone SDK is a brilliantly simple yet extremely robust set of development tools....Palms Mojo SDK......eh.......as Balmer says, "Developers, developers developers"......the developers go where the good tools are, thus, iPhone app development is flourishing while other great even superior phones are failing because of poor SDKs. Don't fool yourself into thinking that a great software technology dependant on developers will survive if the SDK sucks.
Of course, the user experience is King. However, an artist who has been commissioned for a painting wants a great canvas, good brushes and a great selection of paint to create his masterpiece. As an example, the iPhone SDK is a brilliantly simple yet extremely robust set of development tools....Palms Mojo SDK......eh.......as Balmer says, "Developers, developers developers"......the developers go where the good tools are, thus, iPhone app development is flourishing while other great even superior phones are failing because of poor SDKs. Don't fool yourself into thinking that a great software technology dependant on developers will survive if the SDK sucks.
It sounds like you are comparing building an interactive Flash site to the equilivent site in HTML/CSS/JS. Of course Flash I better for that, but this is about streaming video in a more efficient manner. HTML5 allows that with ease. The only caveat is some additional required to get ads and additional features to the video, but the benefits far outweigh any cons which is why you'll see this become increasing popular for delivering video.
This is my final comment on the subject. We all know why people hate Flash. They say it is about the battery life or CPU usage, but that is just a smoke screen. 'Fess up it's the ads. So be careful what you wish for because as soon as the HTML5 ads start showing you won't be able to block them unless you turn off all images and sound. At least with Flash we have Flash Blocker and Click to Flash.
It Is about CPU usage. Before installing Click4Flash not only was the CPU peaking out but my fans were constantly running and Safari was crashing at least once a day. With Click4Flash Safari is very stable, CPU usage is way down and the only crashes I get are Flash Plug-in crashes.
I am not a developer and have no ax to grind for one developer environment over another. I just want a stable system. Flash content as currently being delivered does not provide this.
No, I verified the video was already working with HTML5 via Safari.
Sorry, I misread. I didn't see the bit about you using Chrome.
It's still hit and miss with Safari.
It Is about CPU usage. Before installing Click4Flash not only was the CPU peaking out but my fans were constantly running and Safari was crashing at least once a day. With Click4Flash Safari is very stable, CPU usage is way down and the only crashes I get are Flash Plug-in crashes.
I am not a developer and have no ax to grind for one developer environment over another. I just want a stable system. Flash content as currently being delivered does not provide this.
I agree, ClickToFlash is great. HTML5 video tags are great. Even in this beta with limited controls it still rocks when comparing performance usage.
But Mstone does make a great point. Now, we can easily remove Flash from our pages but as HMTL5 elements and CSS Animations become more prevalent and easy to code they will make their way to our ads and they will be harder to remove. Instead of just disabling Flash we’ll need a more intelligent system for figuring out and determining the ad placement.
The first argument is that we will save resources without Flash so I won’t care about interactive ads with HTML/CSS/JS, but that isn’t necessarily true. Just check out the examples below with Activity Monitor Open to see what I’m talking about. The only saving grace is that this is now, and with WebGL and HTML5 still being new tech, hopefully this will hopefully be minimal processing in the future…Another future potential problem is having ads access WebGL. I don’t wan’t any ad being able to suck resources from GPU just to run some ad I don’t care about. Still, with Flash as the only option being so bad for the enduser I’m all for HTML5, especially for video.
PS: Handbrake stopped supporting AVI/DivX/XviD. It’s about fricken time!
Second of all Adobe did not drop the ball optimizing flash player on mac os x- it's Apple freak control that does not allow/provide hooks to hardware acceleration for third party apps.
I wish people would include some evidence to support the posts. Something, anything at all that helps back up their statement.
I wish people would include some evidence to support the posts. Something, anything at all that helps back up their statement.
Allow me
"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases."
Source: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/f...leasenotes.pdf
Disclaimer: I have no idea if Adobe's claim is true or not. There's some informed-sounding discussion of the issue here.
Allow me
"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases."
Source: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/f...leasenotes.pdf
Disclaimer: I have no idea if Adobe's claim is true or not. There's some informed-sounding discussion of the issue here.
Interesting. Thanks for the post. I’ll have to read the forum discussion on it later, but off the top of my head if other apps can use the H.264 acceleration and the GPU, even WebGL, then I don’t see why Adobe with all it’s other apps that seem to use the GPU can’t figure out how to make Flash HW accelerated on Mac OS X.
edit: From that link…
QuickTime API is too high level for Adobe. It's almost basically, "here is a file, play it". I think they want access to the lower level APIs so they can directly pass in the bitstream or buffers and have more control.
It's currently something like this for QuickTime X:
QuickTime X => QuickTime API => Apple VA framework => PureVideo (driver) => H/W
The Apple VA framework is currently a private framework, so Adobe can't access it.
On Windows, Adobe uses DXVA for Flash, which is on the AppleVA level. Ex. WMP/MediaCenter:
WMP/MediaCenter => MFT/DShow => DXVA => PureVideo (driver) => H/W”
That sounds like a reasonable and valid explanation. That clearly does put a fair amount of the blame into Apple’s court, though it doesn’t excuse the general overall crappiness that is Flash on Mac OS X.
I am not a developer and have no ax to grind for one developer environment over another. I just want a stable system. Flash content as currently being delivered does not provide this.
Ok I lied. I can't resist. One last remark.
See, you nailed it on the the head. "Flash Content" is the problem. Poorly coded applications are the main problem with resource usage, memory leaks, etc. ultimately causing crashes. However properly coded applications run fine. So it is a case of killing the messenger, Flash, when instead it is the programmer who is at fault. Actually the title of programmer is giving many way too much credit.
The more you learn about Actionscript, the easier it is to understand why Flash can be problematic for CPU and memory usage. Flash is a highly versatile programming environment but that versatility comes at a cost. When you are watching a video in Flash you are actually launching dozens of movies within Flash. Every button, counter, slider, etc. is its own movie with a timeline and event listeners constantly refreshing at 24 frames a second. Not just the video itself but dozens of other threads are being used. Quite inefficient to say the least. That is because Flash is not just a dedicated video player. It can do anything. Connect to databases, use web services, upload pictures, play music, plot GIS maps and just about anything else you can imagine.
Unlike an application that is programmed in a lower level language like C, Flash is a scripting language. This is what makes it so easy to code and highly versatile. So I totally agree that there should be a very small dedicated standardized video player, since it would not require the huge overhead that Flash requires in order to do the multitude of other functions that it can do.
Unfortunately that standardization requires cooperation among the various big players which up until now has not happened, hence Flash was the only option available for universal video streaming. Clearly not the best solution but the only one available to 90% of the installed base.
The other thing that eats up resources is graphics. Moving vector graphics across the screen takes a lot of computing power. In Flash it is no different than in a 3D video game. That is just the laws of physics so to speak. So if you are watching a graphically intense Flash page, there is going to be some heat being generated.
If i could only have an option to download these H.264 videoclips - never back to FLASH
You easily can, Google has a bookmarklet
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/200...mp4-files.html
Not sure why they just don't have the h.264 mpeg4 link visible all the time
Flash can be problematic for CPU and memory usage.
You've changed your tune
To be fair, so can Javascript. I just looked at a Spectrum (80s home computer) emulator - extraordinary that you can do this stuff in JS - that boosted my Safari CPU usage to 40%. And Safari itself loves to eat up RAM...
I reckon the Chrome page-sandboxing approach is the way to go.
The problem is also social and economic: there are numerous large companies; certain egoistical CEOs; and proprietary, heavily patent-encumbered software and hardware standing between the developer and the user, even assuming the developer knows to do the right thing.