What's the easiest way to put a video in an HTML page?

[NickFitz]

Works fine on Windows. Perhaps OSX is inherently inferior? It has to be something to do with the interface with the OS as the OSX Flash player is obviously 99% the same Intel code that runs on the Windows version. I'm guessing OSX just doesn't have the raster graphics performance that Windows has with DirectX, and that leads to a higher CPU usage in trying to get things on the screen.

OS X has rendering performance as good as or better than Windows, but Flash itself seems to have been developed with too many dependencies on the Windows architecture. One gets the impression that, having failed to achieve a clean design, they are unable to create a version that can make proper use of other platforms' capabilities. To quote Adobe: "Hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding is supported on some video cards and drivers running on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Linux and Mac OS X hardware-accelerated decoding is not supported in this version."

It sucks on Linux too.

[VectraMan]

OS X has rendering performance as good as or better than Windows, but Flash itself seems to have been developed with too many dependencies on the Windows architecture. One gets the impression that, having failed to achieve a clean design, they are unable to create a version that can make proper use of other platforms' capabilities. To quote Adobe: "Hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding is supported on some video cards and drivers running on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Linux and Mac OS X hardware-accelerated decoding is not supported in this version."

It sucks on Linux too.

But from your own link, an explanation from Adboe:

Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?

A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

It's not that Adobe CBA to do a proper job, it's that Apple likes to restrict what third parties can do (and that Linux can't get themselves organised.). Windows is the most flexible platform, and it's no suprise that third party software would run better.

The Flash architecture isn't based on Windows. Flash has its own renderer, which means all the drawing it does is entirely OS independent.

Any kind of hardware acceleration is what's alien, because that has to hook into the OS and graphics drivers. They can do it with Windows because DirectX lets you (I know - I've done it), but as I understand it Apple only provide the creaky old Quicktime API, which is a high level "play a video file" API and not a low level graphics engine like DirectX. Which is fine for HTML, but no good for something as flexible as Flash.

[NickFitz]

But from your own link, an explanation from Adboe:



http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

It's not that Adobe CBA to do a proper job, it's that Apple likes to restrict what third parties can do (and that Linux can't get themselves organised.). Windows is the most flexible platform, and it's no suprise that third party software would run better.

The Flash architecture isn't based on Windows. Flash has its own renderer, which means all the drawing it does is entirely OS independent.

Any kind of hardware acceleration is what's alien, because that has to hook into the OS and graphics drivers. They can do it with Windows because DirectX lets you (I know - I've done it), but as I understand it Apple only provide the creaky old Quicktime API, which is a high level "play a video file" API and not a low level graphics engine like DirectX. Which is fine for HTML, but no good for something as flexible as Flash.

As far as video is concerned that's becoming irrelevant anyway: HTML5 renders Flash video redundant. In a couple of years, the primary use for Flash on the web will be irritating adverts (and possibly stuff for the dwindling band of IE users, if MS don't implement all of HTML5 in IE9), and then everybody will block it anyway

[VectraMan]

As far as video is concerned that's becoming irrelevant anyway: HTML5 renders Flash video redundant. In a couple of years, the primary use for Flash on the web will be irritating adverts (and possibly stuff for the dwindling band of IE users, if MS don't implement all of HTML5 in IE9), and then everybody will block it anyway

I don't know about that. In some ways it's a shame that Flash has become the internet video standard because it means people can dismiss it by saying HTML5 will replace it. Which isn't true, HTML5 won't do 99% of what Flash can do. If the association with advertising dwindles, then the advertisers will find a different way. Maybe SVG will become the standard for ads, or maybe some other "open" standard, but the advertisers will always find a way, because that's the nature of the world.

Meanwhile if Flash does die off, then we'll have lost the best and most widely available cross-platform application platform there's ever been. No wonder Apple are scared of it: Flash exposes their platform as no better than anybody else's, because Flash is the same on every platform (H264 hardware acceleration notwithstanding).

[NickFitz]

Meanwhile if Flash does die off, then we'll have lost the best and most widely available cross-platform application platform there's ever been. No wonder Apple are scared of it: Flash exposes their platform as no better than anybody else's, because Flash is the same on every platform (H264 hardware acceleration notwithstanding).

I don't think Apple are scared of it: I think they just don't care about it. It will be irrelevant soon anyway, and good riddance. A combination of HTML5, SVG, CSS3 and compiled JS will render Flash unnecessary for just about every single thing it's currently used for.

One thing that annoys me, although it isn't really Adobe's fault, is how broken the usability and accessibility of 99% of Flash content is. I realise that it is in fact possible to make Flash apps that exhibit great usability and accessibility, but the number of Flash developers who manage that is vanishingly small. It's particularly annoying when they do things like implement their own scrollbars, but only get about 30% of the interaction right: scrollwheels (or trackpad drags) don't work, or paging doesn't page by the correct amount, or they do something utterly imbecilic like scrolling on mouseover... still, there are a majority of incompetent fsckwits developing for any platform; Flash just seems to attract more of them than most, probably because it makes it too easy for people who don't really have sufficient depth of knowledge to con themselves into thinking they're competent "interaction designers", or whatever this month's buzzphrase is.

[VectraMan]

I don't think Apple are scared of it: I think they just don't care about it. It will be irrelevant soon anyway, and good riddance. A combination of HTML5, SVG, CSS3 and compiled JS will render Flash unnecessary for just about every single thing it's currently used for.

Unfortunately I fear that you're right. Then we'll have a very big complicated, clunky, slow, innefficient combination of technologies all with several different slightly-incompatible implementations across platforms, that only somebody such as yourself will have a chance of being able to construct something simple with.

It won't be possible to have a simple authoring tool that any normal person can use, because the million and one subtleties will make anything generic impossible. That's progress for you.

The resistance to Flash on the internet reminds me of the resistance to commercial interests on the internet many a year ago. I'm sure it's the same people. They were against Amazon, they were against Google, they probably hated the idea of animated GIFs, hated JPEGs because that gave rise to porn, which they also hated, they would have been horrified by the idea of forums (because the internet should only be about publishing documents), and if any hadn't had an annuerism yet they'd have probably had one at the thought of video on the net.

Fortunately, others see progress as a useful thing. Incidentally IIRC IE4 had the ability to embedd video. No doubt you'd have been upset by the non-standard'ness of it all back then, but now, 15 years I guess later, everybody's building it into their browsers (well they would if they could agree).



You are right about the amount of bad Flash out there, but you have to admit there's an awful lot of bad HTML/Javascript/CSS too.

[NickFitz]

Unfortunately I fear that you're right. Then we'll have a very big complicated, clunky, slow, innefficient combination of technologies all with several different slightly-incompatible implementations across platforms, that only somebody such as yourself will have a chance of being able to construct something simple with.

The primary purpose of HTML5 is to address those incompatibilities such that cross-browser problems are eradicated. This is why the vast majority of the spec relates to precisely defining the rules for parsing content, as they are currently implemented in browsers (which includes various odd behaviours that date back as far as Netscape Navigator 2).

In addition, whereas 1990s W3C specs tended to be ambiguous or under-specified, leading to more incompatibilities, the emphasis of the HTML5 effort is that new stuff should also be so clearly and unambiguously specified that implementations can only fail to be interoperable by explicitly deviating from the spec.

Some parts of HTML5 have already been implemented in IE8, and Microsoft have provided comprehensive test suites to the wider development community, whilst also making use of test suites developed outside Microsoft. Microsoft, Opera, Apple, Google, and Mozilla are all actively involved with the development of the HTML5 spec.

As far as CSS is concerned, Microsoft created and open-sourced the most comprehensive CSS2.1 test suite yet seen as part of their work on IE8; as they have already announced IE9 support for many of those parts of CSS3 that are already supported in other browsers, they will probably do the same there.

On the JS front, MS have been working on a definitive list of ways their implementation (JScript) and those of others differ from ECMAScript 3rd edition (PDF, linked from near the end of this blog post); again, the development of ECMAScript 5th edition (standardised late last year) is something to which all the browser vendors have contributed, and MS's work on JScript is indicative of their intention to become fully conformant to ES 5th edition, as is also the intention of all the other browser vendors.

I think the browser vendors have all accepted that interoperability and conformance to industry-standard specification backed by accepted test suites is essential for the future of the web. Rather than competing on the number of new, non-standard tags they can introduce with each version, they are now focused on improving the usability of and adding features to their applications, while competing to provide the best performance from their rendering and scripting engines.

[d000hg]

A pro-MS post, Nick - did I drop into a parallel dimension?

[NickFitz]

A pro-MS post, Nick - did I drop into a parallel dimension?

There are some good people at MS who are serious about web standards and embrace the concept of the open web. They sometimes have to do a fair bit of fighting against the tide, though.

[lightng]

There are some good people at MS who are serious about web standards and embrace the concept of the open web. They sometimes have to do a fair bit of fighting against the tide, though.

[ThrowAwayComment style="bracing for yet another court appearance"]By chance, I just finished watching a film about some good Nazis. Erm, not that its anything to do with your paragraph about MS. Just thought I'd mention that completely unrelated fact.[/ThrowAwayComment]