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To keep Flash relevant, Adobe must resort to the nuclear option

15 points by techdog 17y ago

messel 17y ago
I wonder why Flash didn't open up it's format and offer it up as an alternative?
- riffic 17y ago
  because it's crap and everyone knows it. can we stop upvoting threads about flash now?
nfnaaron 17y ago
The first comment after the article, by Sh0rtWave has some good pro-Flash observations.
- grogers 17y ago
  While video may be a small aspect of what flash provides, it is likely the overwhelming majority of what flash is actually used for. He's right that even if flash video was obsoleted, it wouldn't die completely because it does have other legitimate uses.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
It's interesting that everyone seems to accept "we can't make this open source because of H.264" from Adobe far more than they accept the opposite "we can't use H.264 because we're open source" from Mozilla.
- viraptor 17y ago
  I could make a guess. Adobe is a big corporation that can still put a lot of pressure on others in many different ways. They probably have devs who could write own implementation of H.264 given enough time. They could release their solution based on a licence that doesn't prevent linking with closed codec. Or many other things... Mozilla is bound by the license. If you find a good enough codec, you can create a plugin yourself - but it will not be included in the main package, unless it's open.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    > If you find a good enough codec, you can create a plugin yourself No, you can't. Gecko links directly with liboggplay to support <video> and <audio>. To hack it to do something sane you'd have to fork both Gecko and XULrunner, and distribute your own builds of Firefox with unofficial branding.
    - viraptor 17y ago
      There are many ways to hijack the content. Are you sure you cannot make an extension that rewrites the page before the <video> tag is interpreted by the browser and injects some custom object instead (handled by the h264 plugin)? Actually, I just realised that noscript does a similar thing (proxy object instead of flash content) - so it has to be possible.
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        If you're just wanting to display video then I'm fairly certain that Firefox will hand off any video you give it to an application that registers to handle it via the object tag. For example, I'm fairly certain that this how it reacts to stuff that Apple serves directly to quicktime (trailers and product promos), when you're on Linux.
        blasdel 17y ago
        Firefox doesn't do that, your NSAPI plugins do: on Linux there are plugins that wrap mplayer, vlc, or totem supporting the quicktime API in widespread use. Unfortunately all of them suck terribly -- seeking is always broken, they always find a way to do the wrong thing wrt progressive download, weirdass YUV->RGB artifacts after dropped keyframes, etc. You could write a new NSAPI plugin using ffmpeg that provides the <video> API but proxied through <object>, and package it in an XPI along with some greasemonkey-style extension code to rewrite the tags and provide the default playback UI.

15 points by techdog 17y ago

messel 17y ago

I wonder why Flash didn't open up it's format and offer it up as an alternative?

riffic 17y ago
because it's crap and everyone knows it. can we stop upvoting threads about flash now?

nfnaaron 17y ago

The first comment after the article, by Sh0rtWave has some good pro-Flash observations.

grogers 17y ago
While video may be a small aspect of what flash provides, it is likely the overwhelming majority of what flash is actually used for. He's right that even if flash video was obsoleted, it wouldn't die completely because it does have other legitimate uses.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

It's interesting that everyone seems to accept "we can't make this open source because of H.264" from Adobe far more than they accept the opposite "we can't use H.264 because we're open source" from Mozilla.

viraptor 17y ago
I could make a guess. Adobe is a big corporation that can still put a lot of pressure on others in many different ways. They probably have devs who could write own implementation of H.264 given enough time. They could release their solution based on a licence that doesn't prevent linking with closed codec. Or many other things... Mozilla is bound by the license. If you find a good enough codec, you can create a plugin yourself - but it will not be included in the main package, unless it's open.
- blasdel 17y ago
  > If you find a good enough codec, you can create a plugin yourself No, you can't. Gecko links directly with liboggplay to support <video> and <audio>. To hack it to do something sane you'd have to fork both Gecko and XULrunner, and distribute your own builds of Firefox with unofficial branding.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    There are many ways to hijack the content. Are you sure you cannot make an extension that rewrites the page before the <video> tag is interpreted by the browser and injects some custom object instead (handled by the h264 plugin)? Actually, I just realised that noscript does a similar thing (proxy object instead of flash content) - so it has to be possible.
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      If you're just wanting to display video then I'm fairly certain that Firefox will hand off any video you give it to an application that registers to handle it via the object tag. For example, I'm fairly certain that this how it reacts to stuff that Apple serves directly to quicktime (trailers and product promos), when you're on Linux.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        Firefox doesn't do that, your NSAPI plugins do: on Linux there are plugins that wrap mplayer, vlc, or totem supporting the quicktime API in widespread use. Unfortunately all of them suck terribly -- seeking is always broken, they always find a way to do the wrong thing wrt progressive download, weirdass YUV->RGB artifacts after dropped keyframes, etc. You could write a new NSAPI plugin using ffmpeg that provides the <video> API but proxied through <object>, and package it in an XPI along with some greasemonkey-style extension code to rewrite the tags and provide the default playback UI.