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The demo is impressive, but Flash absolutely can do all those things, albeit in Actionscript rather than Javascript. In fact that's the reason Flash has largely

by tjmc 17y ago

The demo is impressive, but Flash absolutely can do all those things, albeit in Actionscript rather than Javascript. In fact that's the reason Flash has largely replaced all the other video plugins like Quicktime and Windows Media Player. They weren't customizable. Flash is. Now, being able to do that customisation natively in Javascript is awesome, but the issue of HTML5 adoption is a much bigger problem and it's even worse now that there are competing codecs. Adoption of any Ogg format is usually a good indication that the pointy heads have won over the pragmatists. H264 is the more sensible choice for video.

xal 17y ago
Agreed H264 is the only reasonable choice. Ogg is great and it's cool that it exists and is supported but if there is no common codec that works flawlessly across all the implementations we will have a huge problem on our hands. h264 is going to be the dominant codec for the next decade so not supporting it in the web browsers just inconveniences everyone until they do.
godDLL 17y ago
Yes, is impressive; no, not all of those things, but most (I see you know your ActionScript 3.0); Theora is improving faster than H.264 (which is not improving) and so will surpass it eventually – without the royalty issues; I agree with you on all points if we are taking into account only the scope of the next two years – but we should be thinking a bit further into the future.
- tjmc 17y ago
  I'd be very surprised if HTML 5 gains mass market share within 2 years. Unfortunately, the majority of businesses simply standardize on the browser that ships with the desktop OS they use. That's why IE6 is still so pervasive, as most businesses use WinXP on the desktop. I suspect the next large corporate migration will be to Win 7 desktops and IE8 which again means no support. Mac users on Safari may have support but it'll be H264. The problem here is one with all technology - adoption rates drop significantly when a good enough solution is already in place. Flash does video well enough that most people won't see the need to change.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Flash video didn't win because it was customizable, it won because it was available on both Windows and Macs, and actually installed on a big bunch of them. Note this is despite inferior quality compared with the other plugins. Note that Flash video now provides H.264/AAC codecs that are already built into my Mac, my iPhone and Google Chrome. What exactly is it adding there to make up for the fact that it's not on my iPhone, and it's a crashy resource hogging POS on the Mac? This was the only sane choice for them, but a real gamble too since it's a widely used-standard which breaks their lock-in. Now, H.264 has a lot going for it, but it's fundamentally incompatible with Open Source. And if it wasn't for Open Source then we'd all still be using IE6 and the web as we know it today simply wouldn't exist. Flash, Silverlight etc. aren't going to go away any time soon, but the Theora codecs are both pragmatic and idealistic choices for the web. You can already get Firefox plugins that encode video, and there's serious work happening on webapps for editing video. Smothering all that innovation with codec licences incompatible with open source would be crazy.

by tjmc 17y ago

xal 17y ago

Agreed H264 is the only reasonable choice. Ogg is great and it's cool that it exists and is supported but if there is no common codec that works flawlessly across all the implementations we will have a huge problem on our hands. h264 is going to be the dominant codec for the next decade so not supporting it in the web browsers just inconveniences everyone until they do.

godDLL 17y ago

Yes, is impressive; no, not all of those things, but most (I see you know your ActionScript 3.0); Theora is improving faster than H.264 (which is not improving) and so will surpass it eventually – without the royalty issues; I agree with you on all points if we are taking into account only the scope of the next two years – but we should be thinking a bit further into the future.

tjmc 17y ago
I'd be very surprised if HTML 5 gains mass market share within 2 years. Unfortunately, the majority of businesses simply standardize on the browser that ships with the desktop OS they use. That's why IE6 is still so pervasive, as most businesses use WinXP on the desktop. I suspect the next large corporate migration will be to Win 7 desktops and IE8 which again means no support. Mac users on Safari may have support but it'll be H264. The problem here is one with all technology - adoption rates drop significantly when a good enough solution is already in place. Flash does video well enough that most people won't see the need to change.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Flash video didn't win because it was customizable, it won because it was available on both Windows and Macs, and actually installed on a big bunch of them. Note this is despite inferior quality compared with the other plugins. Note that Flash video now provides H.264/AAC codecs that are already built into my Mac, my iPhone and Google Chrome. What exactly is it adding there to make up for the fact that it's not on my iPhone, and it's a crashy resource hogging POS on the Mac? This was the only sane choice for them, but a real gamble too since it's a widely used-standard which breaks their lock-in. Now, H.264 has a lot going for it, but it's fundamentally incompatible with Open Source. And if it wasn't for Open Source then we'd all still be using IE6 and the web as we know it today simply wouldn't exist. Flash, Silverlight etc. aren't going to go away any time soon, but the Theora codecs are both pragmatic and idealistic choices for the web. You can already get Firefox plugins that encode video, and there's serious work happening on webapps for editing video. Smothering all that innovation with codec licences incompatible with open source would be crazy.