The Insulting Mess That Is Flash Video On My Mac

Kevin Edwards said:

There’s good news for you.  Adobe fairly recently opened up its format, both the container (FLV) and the code for the players (SWF). 

Content providers can now use H.264 encoded video.  The immediate effect of this is that Flash contained video (FLVs) could be much higher quality at the same data rate as before.

However, because they also opened the code for the players (SWF), it means that a Flash based player embedded on a page can play a H.264 MP4 file.

This means that content providers can produce one video file and serve it in a variety of ways.  At Connected Social Media, for example, we produce one 480x270 H.264 encoded MP4 file that is Baseline encoded specifically to allow playback on iPods, iPhones, and the Apple TV.  This format also plays on most other platforms.  It is by far, the most compatible container format (MP4) that could be used and the encoding format (H.264) is very popular (although not the most popular) and provides the best quality/data rate ratio.

At this point, it comes down to what player gets embedded in the page itself.  We got a lot of feedback, and contrary to my own opinion, most people preferred Flash as the player format over QuickTime.  It should be noted that Flash also provides a lot of features that are not capable with QuickTime.  Also, while QuickTime is much more popular today because of iTunes, it’s still not as popular as Flash.

However, since the media file is independent of the player, we can offer the MP4 as the file download as well as the attached file for the RSS feed.  This allows the end user to view the media in whatever video player of choice they prefer…QuickTime Player, iTunes, Windows Media Player, VLC, etc…

But wait…there’s more:

Soon, HTML5 will allow for an open standard based player that will be independent of Flash, Windows Media or even QuickTime.  We’ll be able to embed the MP4 file and anyone with an HTML5 compatible browser will be able to play it.  It will be extremely efficient and allow additional player functionality like Flash does.

The bad news, is that it’s going to take a long time to upgrade everyone to HTML5 compatible browsers….Not companies like Apple, but end users who are still running really old versions of IE.

DanMan said:

I never tire of hearing Flash-bashing because I’m sick of how widespread it is, primarily because the Mac version is such a poor performer (and gets worse with each version)! I use an aging iBook G4, so I don’t expect massive speed, but I think playing a low-res YouTube video is a reasonable expectation. The latest version of Flash plays back choppily and the audio cuts in and out quite often! You could chock this up to running hardware that’s 5 years old, except that this machine can handle full-screen H.264 just fine! It can’t do HD files too well, but the screen on it isn’t HD resolution anyway. Flash even plays back slowly on a much newer dual G5 system I use at work with a much better graphics card.

Adobe might make a Mac version of Flash, but it is so poorly optimized that it’s like a totally different program compared to the Windows version.

ZapPow said:

You heretic ! What you’re asking for goes against corporate religion. They have to fight to impose their dogma, I mean their format. It’s part of the fun, so they can say “mine may not be better than yours, but most people use mine, na na na”.

Seriously, I hope you don’t entertain any… hope about seeing all those firms adopt a common standard, after having seen what happened whith Common Document Format, audio formats, vector image formats…