Funny “no Flash” on iPhone video

Then you have the other issue...

http://newsbiscuit.com/article/apple-iphone-can...

;)

That's brilliant!

Thanks Robert for the great find.

Wonder why they'd have not handled this issue prior to release. Great vid, btw. :)

I wonder what were they thinking in Apple, releasing a browsing device without flash?;)

I hope Apple stands firm on this. Web sites shouldn't be built on proprietary plug-ins like Flash, when open standards like SVG are perfectly capable of replacing them. We didn't get rid of captive-X from the evil empire just to get into the same situation with Adobe.

Sigh.

A lot of the world's best online games over on Electronic Arts Pogo.com and sites like Kongregate are built in Flash.

I guess you don't want any of those games on my iPhone. Well, screw off. I want to have Tower Defense and other games on my iPhone. SVG isn't going to get those games on my iPhone.

Standards are fun but first Apple needs to support what people already have done and built. Flash is it.

YouTube is built in Flash, not SVG.

God, I hate people who have attitudes like yours.

Tomonzo: I hear Apple has some SVG bigots just like SomeGuy working on the iPhone team.

Engineers like purity and standards. The market just wants the job done.

People like Some Guy shouldn't be listened to and, if they persist, should be fired.

Maybe you didn't get the memo, but the reason why YouTube's video is such crap is flash. That's why they're going to H.264 to support TV and the iPhone.

I hope there are SVG advocates on the iPhone team. It's a superior technology.

BTW, if you want to play games, why don't you get an Xbox 360?

(Oh, wait... Make that three Xbox 360s, so you'll have a decent chance of having a working unit.)

I have a 360 and it works just fine.

But when I'm waiting in some security line, tell me how to play my 360. I'll have my iPhone with me.

SVG can replace Flash?! Don't be so ignorant and research more. This is like saying a couple of shoes can replace an airplane, or a GIF can replace a 8mm movie, or a rope can replace a bridge.

God, I hate when people start talking how much they hate something they obviously know so little about.

Stop the bigotry. This doesn't get you freedom of choice or anything of the sort, it just makes you seem stupid. What's next: we don't need the web with its fancy images because we already got telnet?!

Robert,

Here's an interesting take on why Flash isn't on the iPhone. I didn't write it; just forwarding it on:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07...

"In any case, the iPhone is Apple's best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such. The company just recently removed all remains of Flash from its corporate website, implementing everything that had been Flash-based using standards-based Ajax techniques instead."

and

"Three years ago, Apple refused to include support for Windows Media on the iPod. That resulted in the online music market being opened up and pushed toward the vendor agnostic MPEG AAC format."

An interesting take.

SVG is not anywhere near as capable as Flash. It's too verbose, lacking in features and flexibility, and most importantly, has no VM. Flash Player has one of the fastest VMs available on a computer, is OPEN SOURCE (check Tamarin project at Mozilla), and will be used in future versions of Firefox. Also, the quality of video on YouTube isn't due to Flash technology, it's due to the fact that YouTube has opted to use the open source (and illegal) FFMPEG library to encode Sorenson h.263 video instead of using Flash's newer VP6 codec - which rivals h.264. Why do they use Flash? Because EVERYONE has it. It's the most widely distributed piece of software on the planet - period. Flash Player offers WAAAAAAAAAY more in capabilities than SVG, or any other "open standard." It also offers a VERY PREDICTABLE environment to develop against. How much time do you spend debugging between browsers and platforms? And did I mention that the VM in Flash is Open Source? The file format is open? SOMEGUY: You should learn more about Flash AND SVG before you profess to downplay either one of them.

"the iPhone is Apple’s best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such."

That's just stupid. Why would Apple want to "kill Flash"? Microsoft doesn't even want to "kill Flash" - they use it ALL OVER their website (check their recent product, "Surface" - http://www.microsoft.com/surface/). Microsoft just wants to stay relevant on the Internet - and they are quickly becoming less and less relevant among web developers. Also, sophisticated web applications (*cough* Google *cough*) are a huge threat to the OS - which is where MS makes it's money. But I'm straying from the point.

Apple doesn't want to "kill Flash" - they use Flash on their website from time to time but have recently favored using - GET THIS - Quicktime to do so! Shocking! Apple's using their own rich client for displaying rich media on their own website. How dare they? Microsoft doesn't even use Silverlight on their website (yet).

By the way, those Xbox Live marketplace games that you download an play -- most of them are Flash. That's right, they're Flash. Microsoft ships their own version of Flash Player on the Xbox 360 and they have a big team in their casual games unit that builds games using Flash and a custom plugin they built for Visual Studio for doing ActionScript development.

Daniel Eran has a very interesting perspective, and I certainly hope he's correct that leaving flash out of the iPhone was a policy decision, and not just a matter of how much they could have done by the launch date. Flash is a bug, not a feature.

Apple has never been known as an advocate of open source when it comes to their own playground. I wouldn't want to work with javascript based animation technologies that all the so called experts are pushing to try to get engineers doing what artists have been doing for 10 years -- animation and games for the masses that aren't built over ten months but ten days. Come on Apple, give it up. No one is going to buy your games from iTunes, no matter how much you wish it to be. This is not what the web browser was meant to be -- why include object/embed tags in HTML at all? Forget about all the sites with .net embedded activeX controls that are required for some enterprise environments. I think you'll find that the iPhone will only work with 1/5 sites with no loss in content. Ajax blows -- where's the Flash IDE equivalent for Ajax? Yeah, I thought so. Flash is for the little guy, Ajax is for IBM.

Whether or not Flash is supported on the iPhone is irrelevant to the success of Flash, but it is certainly a 'ding' on the iPhone feature list and probably not relevant to the iPhone success either. It seems the battery issues and ATT lock-in will have more to do with the long term of that horse.

@Some (lol) Guy: SVG/Linux/pick-yer-religion zealots are always amusing - the SVG argument always reminds me of the joke where a d-list actor says to the French waiter "Don't you know who I am?" and the French waiter replies "Non, Monsieur... who zee fuck are you?" In other words - if SVG was so great and competative, you'd see it used all over the web, its been around long enough and the 10 hardcore SVG zealots out there should have created *some* kind of web wonder to point at by now... right? right?? *ahem* link please...

Mike,

SVG + JS gives me anything I might want to do with Flash. In the words of the sages: been there, evaluated that.

Steve, don't make the mistake that I advocate SVG. I simply point out that it's an open, free alternative to Flash. If it were up to me, I'd impose a flogging on anyone using flash for anything that can be done with HTML, *especially* those freaking oh-so-clever real estate agents' web sites.

I'm not sure I buy the analogy of AAC on the iPod. I'm pretty certain 99% of the music on iPods is MP3. I do sense the exclusion of Flash was intentional however. Exactly the master plan and the deal or lack of with Adobe we sure won't find out any time soon. I do accept that excluding Flash might be Apple's "best shot" at eliminating Flash--but that's like saying their chance is now 0.0001 out of a million instead of an even lower number. SVG... funny. YouTube exemplifying the best possible Flash video... similarly funny. For better or worse, the internet without Flash is not the internet. I can't believe I agree a little with "Some (unnamed) Guy" when he says you shouldn't use Flash when you could use HTML. But, man, get real please.

First, I'm not an "SVG bigot" and I don't agree with "Some Guy" on many things (including "flogging", wtf?!?).

Further, I don't think SVG is a replacement for Flash - and I think the iPhone will have some form of Flash on it eventually.

But whoever said that "SVG has no VM" doesn't know what they are talking about. SVG/Flash are the languages. Browsers/plugins/players are the things that run/interpret the languages (i.e. the "virtual machine"), So saying "SVG has no VM" is really nonsensical. The JavaScript interpreter + DOM _IS_ the VM for SVG browsers.

And the other quote that got me was "if SVG was so great and competative [sic], you’d see it used all over the web" - surely you realize that whether a technology succeeds or fails does not depend solely on its technical merits. Corporate agendas have a lot to do with it too. If Flash doesn't succeed, Adobe won't be able to keeping sell its developer tools. Same goes with Silverlight and Microsoft. And I'm not saying this is a bad/good thing, either.

After reading a bit more articles on the iphone, I have my own take as to why we've not seen Flash on the iPhone yet:

Outside of hardware graphics acceleration, the iPhone is pretty slow compared to a computer. Really, really slow, actually (see the benchmarks linked below). Some blogs talk about the iPhone having a very specific video codec that is hardware accelerated, and it's the only type of video that the iphone will play. Hence the custom Youtube video app with only a small sliver of videos available.

So, my guess is that a *straight* port of Flash to the iPhone was embarrassingly slow. Video playback sucked; perhaps even semi-complex vector rendering sucked too. So Apple, rather than ship with a Flash experience that made the iPhone look slow, tabled it altogether until Adobe (or Apple, or both) could optimize it for the iPhone's hardware. They then pulled the Flash from their site so that apple.com was fully "iPhone compatible" -- it would be silly if the iPhone couldn't view all of Apple's own site. Apple probably yanked any flavor of Quicktime from the site that was not iPhone compatible too.

Javascript benchmarks here:
http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/07/01/iphone-java...

Note that this is running in Javascript inside of Safari, so it's safe to assume that the javascript engine was as least *somewhat* optimized by Apple for the iPhone. Still, these numbers aren't anywhere even close to comparable to what a PC can handle. Without heavy optimizing, my guess is Flash on iPhone would crawl slower than a baby.

I don't doubt though that at some point, it will be optimized to a reasonable degree.

"SVG + JS gives me anything I might want to do with Flash. In the words of the sages: been there, evaluated that."

If you are comfortable with that, then fine, but there are plenty of others out there that want to push the web beyond what browsers along are capable of.

There are plenty of things that Flash can do that SVG can't. Video and Audio are two big things, not to mention high performance rendering of vector AND bitmap assets.

While I agree that HTML should be chosen first if possible, it's ignorant to think that SVG could replace Flash.

I saw a blog by a Laszlo engineer and he said that even Laszlo sucks on an iPhone (Laszlo is an open source Flash compiler using declarative markup that pre-dates Flex and now incorporates standard DHTML). I don't have a link unfortunately, but he was mentioning that just a simple Laszlo DHTML button is a hog on the system. A nice, candid observation, I thought.

I was once a big advocate of SVG but you can't ignore an installed base like Flash. Hopefully the next version of iPhone will incorporate Flash.

The Archos 605 WiFi is the first product that supports full screen flash video streaming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBO9r8iU9EA

it also supports flash video in normally embedded mode, but for watching video the full-screen mode is automatic and is a much better experience. Full-screen flash is something we hardly have on our computers and Archos does it automatically for video (a popup asks if you want to watch the video in full-screen mode or in normal embedded mode).

More videos of the Archos here: http://archosfans.com/2007/07/07/english-dubbed...

Some Guy wrote:
>>If it were up to me, I’d impose a flogging on anyone using flash for anything that can be done with HTML.

I agree with that sentiment, my arguments on SVG have more to do with the ecosphere and practical realities of multimedia development - tools, skillsets and momentum.

Jeff S wrote:
> And the other quote that got me was “if SVG was so great and competative [sic] (thank you :), you’d see it used all over the web” - surely you realize that whether a technology succeeds or fails does not depend solely on its technical merits.

Of course I realize that, technology succeeds or fails based on adoption and durability. While empires can and will always fall eventually, I think it is safe to say that Flash has 'succeeded' in this era.

Hanford -- good observation, but in the end that's something to be expected. Mobile devices always have a much slower cpu, and much less memory, than a desktop computer - they just are carefully engineered to avoid unnecessary overhead by the operating system layer and all that so it "feels" fast. And despite all the reality distortion employed by Steve Jobs, the iPhone *is* still a mobile device and subject to the same limitations all similar devices have to face.

With Flash, this has been addressed in the past with Flash Lite, which is like Flash but with a few less features and optimized for mobile devices. In FL's case, it doesn't run flv videos, but rather 3gp videos, which are decompressed and played by hardware; that's why it's not a surprise that iPhone's h.264 decoder is hardware-accelerated, it has to be.

When/if Flash gets ported to the iPhone, it would probably run Flash Lite, or some kind of subset of the current Flash Player, as some smart phones have done previously. CPU would still be a concern, but that's what you get when you have a client application instead of just a presentation layer.

here's my take on all this http://kosso.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/flash-on-...

;) kosso

http://lab.nuiman.com/core/mobile/ *whimpers*.. They would make such a lovely couple...

Great article and comments, not much to say other than Flash and Mobile WILL make a beautiful combination (CPU allowed), whether its on the iPhone or not.. Adobe is not going anywhere.. With products like CS3 they will continue to hold the hearts of interaction designers & artists.... and that's who really matter.. not these guys blabbing on about how cool JS+SVG is.... I can already tell he can't design worth a damn.

Some what off topic, it's interesting how much Flash Google has been using lately... makes you wonder...

The iPhone is going to change mobile video forever. Now that people have a great media device, that happens to also be their phone--which they will always have on them.

This is huge. As the iPhone user base grows, a great market for mobile video will emerge.

Apple is getting ready to update QuickTime to regain it's place in the video delivery world. Apple got YouTube, which made Flash video what it is today, to convert to H.264. Repeat that a few times.

We at http://www.hungryflix.com are very excited about the future of mobile video. We've been supporting the iPod with Video from day one. Now that the mobile video audience is set to explode we are ready to deliver great content.

Our site header and best webplayer are flash. ( http://www.ddance.fm )
The webplayer makes it possible to listen behind most corporate firewalls (port80 http)

I'm disappointed Apple!!

I'm torn. I agree with Some Guy that websites shouldn't be built on Flash (or any client-side technology for that matter, even JS), but if Apple is going to promote a new media-device, it would make sense to include Flash. It might even be excusable if the phone was opened up to allow third-party apps and things so that you COULD install a flash player (at this time, I'm not aware of the ability to do so).

Then again, I'm an open-source advocate and dislike using images on my OWN website.

IF this has not Alreday been mentioned it should be, Flash and Quicktime are used together in certain QT VR things, I'm not sure of the specifics, however I keep stumbling upont the Quicktime VR's and getting a prompt about Flash, from QT.

I can't stand the bigotry and total ignorance of a company like Adobe. Running up their prices on this ridiculous piece of software... oh wait... nevermind... it's free! Get over it. If this were Microsoft everyone would be commenting about how much Microsoft sucks, and how ignorant they are for not supporting every lame ass plug-in on the internet.

I have Flash on my iPhone:

http://www.fuseideas.com/index.php?option=com_c...

Flash is the most common form of of video on the internet.Apple really drop the ball on this one .When I purchased my iphone for the internet on my phone I expected it to play flash ,what is the internet without flash ,just blank boxes with some text......I actuallly believe this is false advertising .And to be real...how hard would it be to design a flash player for the iphone.

Wow, this really damages my opinion of Apple if this anti-Flash stuff is true. That would mean those dirt bags are behaving like Microsoft used to, using every little dirty trick they have available to eliminate their competition, instead of simply trying to produce a better product! Shame on Apple! iPhone sucks anyway, I'll never buy one... hahaha!

Don't you iPhone turds even TRY and touch our Flash players, it has come such a long way in terms of market penetration and performance, and is quickly becoming an amazing tool/platform--look at what Adobe is doing with Flex! Don't like it Apple? Bye bye- guess I'll be sticking to your competitors products then, ah well!

NOW!! NOW NOW NOW __ FLash VIDEO on iPHONE!
there is a solution to play all flash videos on your iPhone and iPod — its free - and it works. Great! Now i can visit all videopages with video content and can watch them right on my iPhone.

http://videohamster.com/ipod

Try it and enjoy it. iPhone optimized webpage.

Recently I've read that the Flash codebase is actually very difficult to port and maintain on non-x86/32-bit architectures. Obviously not impossible, since there has long been Flash on Mac-PPC, but note that there is *still* no flash for any 64-bit platform with any OS. Perhaps this harms the performance or feasibility of a port to a mobile device. Further, the same sources cite the incredibly tangled and inelegant codebase as the reason for this lack of portability. I'm sure that's not something that Apple is keen to bring in to its new clean-slate platform.

Finally, it's a little ironic that so many people are criticizing Apple for skipping Flash citing Flash's openness and freedom. Were Flash an open, properly and easily reimplementable standard, Apple could have produced an interpreter and been done with it. However, Flash is closed and is not realistically reimplementable, making everyone dependant on Adobe for support. Now, even presuming Adobe were willing to make whatever ports and modifications to the Flash player anyone cared to request (hint: they're not), you're presuming that it's *possible* for them to do so. I strongly suspect that it's not easy.

What's happened is what happened with the MS-Word .doc format. We all spent collectively millions of man-hours producing content targeted at a format that was really defined only by the quirks of its single implementation in software. That is, when you speak of a Flash "standard," you're really just saying "content that utilizes the quirks and bugs of the binary produced by Adobe." This makes it virtually inconceivable that anyone else will ever fully support the format and suspect whether it will ever reach all the platforms one might want to deploy on in the future; viz. the iPhone. Frankly this makes its viablity as a long term format questionable.

While I sympathize with the need to utilize the technologies actually available in the marketplace, for these reasons I'd hesitate to commit many resources to producing content in Flash. I'd rather retain control over my data and work product so that I don't lose my investment. Make use of it where necessary but don't overcommit and be ready to replace those pieces of your infrastructure that depend on it (note the aforementioned real estate agents with totally Flash based sites, now unreachable from iPhones; probably not good strategy given that people out and about looking at houses will be more likely to be using mobile devices).

Uh guys, SVG does support audio and video. If no current SVG implementation supports it yet, that's a different issue.