The Insulting Mess That Is Flash Video On My Mac
It’s official. I love Safari 4 on my Mac, and on my PC at work. It’s fast. Faster than any other browser. I even got used to the new tabs arrangement and prefer them over any other browser’s tabs.
My only complaint is that Safari 4 crashes more often with Flash videos than ever before, and the crashing was frequent on the previous version of Safari. So, please tell my why we have so many video formats and why is Flash the worst?
Note to Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Why not settle on a single video format that.... (excerpted).
3 Reader Comments
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…
Share Your Comments With Mac360's Writers
You may post your own comment on this article. Or, post in the Mac360 Forums. Either way, it's mostly anonymous, there's no obligation, and no cost. Posting comments is free, fun, low in calories, low in carbs, non-fat, mildly addictive, and may give you mild euphoria (due to the false sense of literary prowess).
Comment Posting Rules
Your comment may be anonymous, if you prefer. Or, use a cute name-- something everyone can remember. An email address is required only if you want to be notified of new comments by other posters, and is always shielded from email spam harvesters (but don't use a Gmail or Yahoo! or Hotmail or any free email service address-- too much spam).
Keep your comment on topic, relevant, worthy, and funny. Or, pick any three. We moderate the comments before posting so SPAM links will be deleted (Spammers-- you're a blight on society, not to mention your body odor, so don't waste your time or our time).
Post Your Comment Here
Please Note: Your comment will not show up immediately. We moderate all reader comments to eliminate spam, off topic posts, and silly arguments. Otherwise, don't worry, post your comment and enjoy. Your email address is never displayed.
- Are Your Apple Predictions As Stupid As These? by Alexis Kayhill, (879 views)
- Mac30 Twitter Tweets
Copyright © 2004 - 2010 Ron McElfresh, Honolulu, HI USA. All Rights Reserved.
Mac360 is best viewed in Safari 4.x or Firefox 3.x browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not supported.
Mac360 is developed on a Mac and powered by an Apple Xserve at ServerLogistics.
This Mac360 page was created in 0.2554 seconds.
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.