4 ms·

> HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance.. Flash video was never perceptibly slower than html p

by fenomas 11y ago

> HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance.. Flash video was never perceptibly slower than html per se. The only thing that really affects video performance is whether or not it's hardware accelerated, and in cases where flash used HW it performed the same as html. The reason it seemed slower is that AFAIK there's never been an HTML video implementation that falls back to software, whereas flash would do so if HW wasn't supported.

lstamour 11y ago
The biggest problem with flash video, to me, is the slow networking and buffering. Native browsers are optimal for such work, ActionScript not so much. Things improved but it was too little too late and Flash video deteriorated its quality further as its use in an automatic fallback to HLS streaming video -- native implementations are simply faster and smoother at playing back video than AS through Flash's convoluted APIs.
acdha 11y ago
Hardware acceleration is a broad term used to describe different things and implementation quality still matters (i.e. does it do everything from format decoding to color conversion, scaling, compositing, etc. and are any individual steps combined?). Every time I've done that comparison, Flash has used significantly more CPU for the same file. It's possible that they've finally managed to get close on the right combination of hardware, OS, and driver versions but given how regularly I still see people talking about huge improvements after uninstalling Flash, I'm skeptical that this is the most common experience. Similarly, hardware acceleration was not a given in the past and since there's still plenty of buggy hardware and drivers out there, both Flash and all major browsers have software playback paths and there's even more room for variation there. It's not as bad as when people were comparing Flash's scalar code to Apple's well-optimized SIMD but if you disable hardware acceleration you can still see major deltas because Adobe was never willing to invest the same amount of effort in optimization. This hit Flash more because there were design constraints which caused it to silently disable HW acceleration and developers using fast desktops often didn't notice that happening. Flash was never better than the native AV frameworks on Windows or OS X. What it offered was convenience during the period when you couldn't rely on everyone having support for a modern video codec and, of course, being able to do things other than simply play back a video file.
- fenomas 11y ago
  To clarify I was mainly talking about the days when HTML video was newish and flash was still a big priority to Adobe, and there was uncertainty which would win. I agree with what you're saying over the long run and certainly today. But I'd have to quibble with saying flash was never better than native playback - presumably so for raw performance, but that wasn't the goal. Flash video was never great for being technically superior, it was great for cutting the Gordian knot that was the codec problem (and indeed one presumes technical tradeoffs had to be made to that end).
  - acdha 11y ago
    The codec problem was real but portability didn't make the performance (or reliability & security) problems inevitable. That was due to Adobe's management seeing the period of browser stagnation & the lack of widely available high-quality codecs as the natural order of things rather than an unlikely opportunity which they'd lucked into. It's interesting to speculate about what might have happened had they chosen to cultivate a culture of software quality rather than putting everything on customer-milking mode. If Flash had performed well and been well-supported with a non-joke update strategy, Steve Jobs wouldn't have had so many enthusiastic supporters in the war on Flash and the second round of browser wars might never have heated up. I count myself in that camp in part because I've always preferred the web's openness but also because I used Flash for a few projects and saw how horrible the experience was – technical debt at record levels, clumsy development tools and lousy documentation, and the $800 price didn't even buy reading comprehension on support requests. Fortunately, WebKit was getting serious traction by then so it became increasingly easy to avoid it. If I had any doubts about that call, it was confirmed when the next Flash release came out a year or so later and all of my bug reports were closed with a generic “please pay $900 to see if this was fixed” message after I'd gone to the trouble of including reproducible test cases for each one.
    - fenomas 11y ago
      That seems like a pretty facile view to take. Fixing the video delivery problem isn't something Flash randomly lucked into - other technologies (Real, QT, etc) existed for no other reason but couldn't do it, because it was hard. Flash became the de facto global standard for delivering interactive content because it solved that problem, and a bunch of others, for a huge number of people, better than the alternatives, for years. If you didn't like the IDE that's fair enough but it's no grounds to claim the team behind it were money-gougers with no regard for software quality.

by fenomas 11y ago

lstamour 11y ago

The biggest problem with flash video, to me, is the slow networking and buffering. Native browsers are optimal for such work, ActionScript not so much. Things improved but it was too little too late and Flash video deteriorated its quality further as its use in an automatic fallback to HLS streaming video -- native implementations are simply faster and smoother at playing back video than AS through Flash's convoluted APIs.

acdha 11y ago

Hardware acceleration is a broad term used to describe different things and implementation quality still matters (i.e. does it do everything from format decoding to color conversion, scaling, compositing, etc. and are any individual steps combined?). Every time I've done that comparison, Flash has used significantly more CPU for the same file. It's possible that they've finally managed to get close on the right combination of hardware, OS, and driver versions but given how regularly I still see people talking about huge improvements after uninstalling Flash, I'm skeptical that this is the most common experience. Similarly, hardware acceleration was not a given in the past and since there's still plenty of buggy hardware and drivers out there, both Flash and all major browsers have software playback paths and there's even more room for variation there. It's not as bad as when people were comparing Flash's scalar code to Apple's well-optimized SIMD but if you disable hardware acceleration you can still see major deltas because Adobe was never willing to invest the same amount of effort in optimization. This hit Flash more because there were design constraints which caused it to silently disable HW acceleration and developers using fast desktops often didn't notice that happening. Flash was never better than the native AV frameworks on Windows or OS X. What it offered was convenience during the period when you couldn't rely on everyone having support for a modern video codec and, of course, being able to do things other than simply play back a video file.

fenomas 11y ago
To clarify I was mainly talking about the days when HTML video was newish and flash was still a big priority to Adobe, and there was uncertainty which would win. I agree with what you're saying over the long run and certainly today. But I'd have to quibble with saying flash was never better than native playback - presumably so for raw performance, but that wasn't the goal. Flash video was never great for being technically superior, it was great for cutting the Gordian knot that was the codec problem (and indeed one presumes technical tradeoffs had to be made to that end).
- acdha 11y ago
  The codec problem was real but portability didn't make the performance (or reliability & security) problems inevitable. That was due to Adobe's management seeing the period of browser stagnation & the lack of widely available high-quality codecs as the natural order of things rather than an unlikely opportunity which they'd lucked into. It's interesting to speculate about what might have happened had they chosen to cultivate a culture of software quality rather than putting everything on customer-milking mode. If Flash had performed well and been well-supported with a non-joke update strategy, Steve Jobs wouldn't have had so many enthusiastic supporters in the war on Flash and the second round of browser wars might never have heated up. I count myself in that camp in part because I've always preferred the web's openness but also because I used Flash for a few projects and saw how horrible the experience was – technical debt at record levels, clumsy development tools and lousy documentation, and the $800 price didn't even buy reading comprehension on support requests. Fortunately, WebKit was getting serious traction by then so it became increasingly easy to avoid it. If I had any doubts about that call, it was confirmed when the next Flash release came out a year or so later and all of my bug reports were closed with a generic “please pay $900 to see if this was fixed” message after I'd gone to the trouble of including reproducible test cases for each one.
  - fenomas 11y ago
    That seems like a pretty facile view to take. Fixing the video delivery problem isn't something Flash randomly lucked into - other technologies (Real, QT, etc) existed for no other reason but couldn't do it, because it was hard. Flash became the de facto global standard for delivering interactive content because it solved that problem, and a bunch of others, for a huge number of people, better than the alternatives, for years. If you didn't like the IDE that's fair enough but it's no grounds to claim the team behind it were money-gougers with no regard for software quality.