Forums | MacLife

Bat · 2009-02-03 3:41 am

We're working on it (again)
By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco {Who? }

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has spun yet another pirouette in his company's dance with Apple regarding the development of a Flash player for the iPhone.

"It’s a hard technical challenge," Narayen told Bloomberg last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating."

The "challenge" part isn't news, seeing as how Flash was developed for the desktop and not for the low-powered CPU and small memory footprint of a handheld device such as the iPhone.

But has this been the only reason for the delay of Flash on the 'Phone? After all, last June, Narayen told analysts who asked about progress on the project: "We are working on it. We have a version that’s working on the emulation." He went on to say that Adobe was "pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date."

Further evidence of Adobe's progress came in September, when Paul Betlem, Adobe's senior director of engineering, said that the player would be available "in a very short time."

Which, as we all know, didn't happen.

C'mon, Adobe! Mark and Pariah can't wait! big_smile

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/02 … challenge/

Pariah · 2009-02-03 4:32 am

Maybe some of the coding done to get flash to work on a handheld will make flash suck less on the desktop?
But, ya, mostly I just wish flash would go away. It is, by a considerable margin, the worst, most annoying and experience degrading technology on the web right now. The only thing that was worse than flash is now is the pop-up storm, mouse trapping that went on in the late 90's.
That went away finally, hopefully flash will go away too, one day.

zeitgeist · 2009-02-03 6:59 am

Pariah wrote:
Maybe some of the coding done to get flash to work on a handheld will make flash suck less on the desktop?
But, ya, mostly I just wish flash would go away. It is, by a considerable margin, the worst, most annoying and experience degrading technology on the web right now. The only thing that was worse than flash is now is the pop-up storm, mouse trapping that went on in the late 90's.
That went away finally, hopefully flash will go away too, one day.

People like embedded video. Flash is a quick way to get the video online. Unless something better comes along, I don't see it going anywhere.

Fracai · 2009-02-03 8:03 am

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/0 … -challenge

Gruber wrote:
Another way to read it is that “collaborating”, without any details of what that collaboration entails, is just an empty word that could mean anything.

Hasn't Apple collaborated with EVERY developer simply by producing the SDK?

avkills · 2009-02-03 9:12 am

So they should just make a FLV viewer then, not a full fledged flash player.

-mark

kman · 2009-02-03 12:19 pm

Yeah I don't love Flash but it does make it easy to have video work on most browsers and most platforms.

What I'm hoping is that the code will lead to better support on imbedded flash plugins, so hopefully sometime soon I can run Hulu on my Wii.

Pariah · 2009-02-03 4:43 pm

zeitgeist wrote:
Pariah wrote:
Maybe some of the coding done to get flash to work on a handheld will make flash suck less on the desktop?
But, ya, mostly I just wish flash would go away. It is, by a considerable margin, the worst, most annoying and experience degrading technology on the web right now. The only thing that was worse than flash is now is the pop-up storm, mouse trapping that went on in the late 90's.
That went away finally, hopefully flash will go away too, one day.
People like embedded video. Flash is a quick way to get the video online. Unless something better comes along, I don't see it going anywhere.

No, "people" as in "consumers" tolerate embedded video because that's all that's offered..
"People" as in the content cartel, love embedded video.

zeitgeist · 2009-02-03 5:05 pm

Pariah wrote:
zeitgeist wrote:
Pariah wrote:
Maybe some of the coding done to get flash to work on a handheld will make flash suck less on the desktop?
But, ya, mostly I just wish flash would go away. It is, by a considerable margin, the worst, most annoying and experience degrading technology on the web right now. The only thing that was worse than flash is now is the pop-up storm, mouse trapping that went on in the late 90's.
That went away finally, hopefully flash will go away too, one day.
People like embedded video. Flash is a quick way to get the video online. Unless something better comes along, I don't see it going anywhere.
No, "people" as in "consumers" tolerate embedded video because that's all that's offered..
"People" as in the content cartel, love embedded video.

How about this... it's very convenient for people who wish to watch streaming videos online and people will continue to use it - demand that it be available - until something better comes along.

Pariah · 2009-02-03 5:27 pm

zeitgeist wrote:
Pariah wrote:
zeitgeist wrote:

People like embedded video. Flash is a quick way to get the video online. Unless something better comes along, I don't see it going anywhere.
No, "people" as in "consumers" tolerate embedded video because that's all that's offered..
"People" as in the content cartel, love embedded video.
How about this... it's very convenient for people who wish to watch streaming videos online and people will continue to use it - demand that it be available - until something better comes along.

Maybe I just dont get it. I have seen embedded avi, mpg, wmv, etc. What makes flash so special except for all the other crap it brings to the table with it?

ScifiterX · 2009-02-03 5:45 pm

WMV is typically what's used for content protection AFAICT and has far to many platform restrictions. MPG seems to only be used in short clips (a couple min) due to it's size. AVI is in part limited by the codec used. I've also not seen a lot of embedded AVI anyway. Could you point me to some?

Pariah · 2009-02-03 6:08 pm

ScifiterX wrote:
WMV is typically what's used for content protection AFAICT and has far to many platform restrictions. MPG seems to only be used in short clips (a couple min) due to it's size. AVI is in part limited by the codec used. I've also not seen a lot of embedded AVI anyway. Could you point me to some?

Not here smile

D'Eyncourt · 2009-02-03 6:34 pm

Pariah wrote:
ScifiterX wrote:
WMV is typically what's used for content protection AFAICT and has far to many platform restrictions. MPG seems to only be used in short clips (a couple min) due to it's size. AVI is in part limited by the codec used. I've also not seen a lot of embedded AVI anyway. Could you point me to some?
Not in a family-oriented forum

Fixed that fer ya.

ScifiterX · 2009-02-03 6:47 pm

There are perhaps more private methods you have not considered. I have seen links to actual AVI files that aren't actually embedded and sometimes don't always work as they are supposed to.

Miles · 2009-02-03 7:21 pm

Pariah wrote:
Maybe I just dont get it. I have seen embedded avi, mpg, wmv, etc. What makes flash so special except for all the other crap it brings to the table with it?

That's what.

kman · 2009-02-03 11:50 pm

The nice thing about flash is that you don't have to worry so much about different codecs. Before people started using flash for video it was a bit of a crapshoot. Around 8 years ago I was building a website and I wanted to have some links you could click to play some sounds. Getting sound formats that would play on Netscape and IE was a nightmare, just on the Mac - let alone PCs as well. Finally I just embedded it into a little animated flash button and the problem was solved. I think it's done the same thing for video. It may not be the best format, but the nearly-universal compatibility is worth something.

kman · 2009-02-03 11:52 pm

Side note - why does VLC play so many more video files that Quicktime does not support? Both are free apps - you'd think Apple would want want its application to support as many formats as possible. I don't get it.

barrfid_od · 2009-02-04 8:07 am

Well WMP doesnt exactly support every codec under the sun

ukimalefu · 2009-02-04 8:48 am

Flash is more than video. There's a LOT of cool stuff I like that is made with Flash.

There's also some sites that I hate because they abuse or misuse Flash. But Flash is not to blame for that.

But THE TOPIC HERE is Flash on the iPhone.

If I had an iPhone, I'd want Flash on it.

~Coxy · 2009-02-04 11:41 pm

kman wrote:
Side note - why does VLC play so many more video files that Quicktime does not support? Both are free apps - you'd think Apple would want want its application to support as many formats as possible. I don't get it.

Apple wants people to use Apple-approved formats as much as possible.
That is why Quicktime, iPod, AppleTV, etc. all only support limited formats out of the box.

ScifiterX · 2009-02-05 10:53 am

True but I'd hardly call the number of approved formats limited Relatively limited in comparison to VLC but hardly limited. Before adding a single codec:

Audio
Apple Lossless
Audio Interchange (AIFF)
Digital Audio: Audio CD - 16-bit (CDDA), 24-bit, 32-bit integer & floating point, and 64-bit floating point
MIDI
MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio (.mp3)
MPEG-4 AAC Audio (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p)
DRM-protected audio from the iTunes store
QDesign Music
Qualcomm PureVoice (QCELP)
Sun AU Audio
ULAW and ALAW Audio
Waveform Audio (WAV)

Video
3GPP & 3GPP2 file formats
AVI file format
DV file (DV NTSC/PAL and DVC Pro NTSC/PAL codecs)
Flash & FlashPix files
H.261, H.263, and H.264 codecs
MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 Video file formats and associated codecs (such as AVC)
MPEG-2 (Playback restricted to DVDs using DVD Player without MPEG-2 Playback component)
Quartz Composer Composition (.qtz, Mac OS X only)
QuickTime Movie (.mov) and QTVR movies
Sorenson Video 2 and 3 codecs
Other video codecs: Apple Video, Cinepak, Component Video, Graphics, and Planar RGB

Image
Bitmap (BMP) codec and file format
GIF and Animated GIF files
JPEG, Photo JPEG, and JPEG-2000 codecs and file formats
Other still image formats: PDF, Pict, PNG, TIFF, TGA, and various icon fomats.

Misc.
Cached information from streams: QTCH

~Coxy · 2009-02-06 1:06 am

OK then, a limited number of useful formats.
Many other useless/obsolete/niche codecs are included out of the box.

ScifiterX · 2009-02-06 9:03 am

The out of box list for WMP really is not any better. VLC, MPlayer, and Miro have rather an exceptional level of out of box format support but lack a certain amount of polish. If you don't believe me try scrubbing through video sometime using the fast forward button or compare how subtitle support looks in VLC or MPlayer compared to QuickTime or better yet try switching audio tracks in Miro.

Forums | MacLife

#1 2009-02-03 3:41 am

Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#2 2009-02-03 4:32 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#3 2009-02-03 6:59 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

Pariah wrote:

#4 2009-02-03 8:03 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

Gruber wrote:

#5 2009-02-03 9:12 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#6 2009-02-03 12:19 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#7 2009-02-03 4:43 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

zeitgeist wrote:

Pariah wrote:

#8 2009-02-03 5:05 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

Pariah wrote:

zeitgeist wrote:

Pariah wrote:

#9 2009-02-03 5:27 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

zeitgeist wrote:

Pariah wrote:

zeitgeist wrote:

#10 2009-02-03 5:45 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#11 2009-02-03 6:08 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

ScifiterX wrote:

#12 2009-02-03 6:34 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

Pariah wrote:

ScifiterX wrote:

#13 2009-02-03 6:47 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#14 2009-02-03 7:21 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

Pariah wrote:

#15 2009-02-03 11:50 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#16 2009-02-03 11:52 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#17 2009-02-04 8:07 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#18 2009-02-04 8:48 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#19 2009-02-04 11:41 pm

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

kman wrote:

#20 2009-02-05 10:53 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#21 2009-02-06 1:06 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

#22 2009-02-06 9:03 am

Re: Adobe claims Apple 'collaboration' on iPhone Flash

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