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For me "easy to use video on the Internet" always was a direct link to a file that I can download just like any file, and play in my media player of choice just

by clarry 13y ago

For me "easy to use video on the Internet" always was a direct link to a file that I can download just like any file, and play in my media player of choice just like any other video file. Flash never worked so well; it only ever caused grief for its crashes, slowness, security problems, nonportability, compatibility issues, etc. So far HTML5 hasn't worked much better. I don't see how flash moved the web forward, it certainly didn't do so for me as a user. Maybe it did for the guys upstream who would rather have control over all my access to their data, instead of letting me just download it and do what I want with it.

therobotking 13y ago
For me the great thing was it allowed streaming video in a quality not matched by the terrible RealPlayer and the like. Downloading videos is easy now but back on slow ADSL to download a video was an overnight task but streaming was pretty much instant.
- clarry 13y ago
  That makes no sense to be honest. If you have the bandwidth to stream a video for uninterrupted playback, you start downloading that file and begin playback while the download continues in the background. In fact there's no difference between streaming and downloading in this case, it's exactly the same thing. The use of the former term in a scenario like this always bothered me.
gkoberger 13y ago
There's two kinds of video on the web. If I'm going to watch a movie, would I prefer to use VLC? Sure. But do I want to download 10 second YouTube clips? God no.
- clarry 13y ago
  Given a direct link to a file, you're free to deal with it however you like. You don't actually have to wget it to your ~/Downloads/ if you don't like. Regardless of what the user interface is going to look like on your end, you're still getting the same bytes and playing them the same way. There are two types of video: video you play back and video you play back. For both, you need to download (or "stream" if you're hip) these bytes.

by clarry 13y ago

therobotking 13y ago

For me the great thing was it allowed streaming video in a quality not matched by the terrible RealPlayer and the like. Downloading videos is easy now but back on slow ADSL to download a video was an overnight task but streaming was pretty much instant.

clarry 13y ago
That makes no sense to be honest. If you have the bandwidth to stream a video for uninterrupted playback, you start downloading that file and begin playback while the download continues in the background. In fact there's no difference between streaming and downloading in this case, it's exactly the same thing. The use of the former term in a scenario like this always bothered me.

gkoberger 13y ago

There's two kinds of video on the web. If I'm going to watch a movie, would I prefer to use VLC? Sure. But do I want to download 10 second YouTube clips? God no.

clarry 13y ago
Given a direct link to a file, you're free to deal with it however you like. You don't actually have to wget it to your ~/Downloads/ if you don't like. Regardless of what the user interface is going to look like on your end, you're still getting the same bytes and playing them the same way. There are two types of video: video you play back and video you play back. For both, you need to download (or "stream" if you're hip) these bytes.