Funny “no Flash” on iPhone video

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-the-iphone/
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_content&task=blogcategory&id=3&Itemid=49

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.