Comment by _jomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _jomo | Hacker News Reader

I don't have Flash installed at all anymore and it works quite well. For the few sites that don't work without Flash these days, I either don't care or use youtube-dl -g [0] or livestreamer [1] and open the direct video link in Browser or VLC.

Twitch is one of the popular sites that don't have a working HTML5 player for the masses (it does work without Flash using the methods above). There's Beam.pro which has some interesting approaches to live streaming with HTML5 [2]. The only thing I haven't found a great solution for are the big Music streaming sites, which all rely on Flash (the others shut down). Some people told me Google Play Music may or may not work with HTML5 but I haven't tried that yet.

Also, a great number of websites will ask you to turn on Flash when installed but deactivated and only use the HTML5 player when it's not actually installed. I guess it's a design flaw that Browsers report disabled or click-to-play plugins to websites.

0: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

1: http://docs.livestreamer.io/

2: https://forums.beam.pro/topic/168/where-we-re-at-with-html5-...

Google Play Music, mildly annoyingly, has adapted HTML5 for pieces of the player interface, but (last I checked) can only deliver the actual audio stream itself with Flash. It's weird.

The RIAA imposes DRM for streaming audio, they probably have yet to switch over to EME.

Oh, wow, I need livestreamer in my life. I like watching twitch but the CPU usage of this simple video stream is absolutely insane, such that my CPU fan has to spin faster for no reason other than inefficient flash plugins.

It's not just Flash. Netflix makes my fan spin like crazy (2011 MBP w/ dedicated GPU) and drain the battery like I drain beer mugs at Oktoberfest. Same laptop + VLC with a BD50 untouched rip: laptop cold enough that the cat doesn't even sniff at it.

I have a hard time reconciling the "don't break the Web" attitude that has painted HTML and JS standards into a corner so many times with the intentional eradication of Flash from the Web.

Flash isn't the web, it's a parallel, proprietary version of it.

At least with pandora, there's a few clients out there that can work outside of a browser. I usually use Pithos[1] or Hermes[2], no idea about the others.

[1] http://pithos.github.io/ [2] http://hermesapp.org/

My personal favorite is pianobar: https://6xq.net/pianobar/. It's a CLI client.

Elpis is a fantastic Pandora Windows desktop client.

https://github.com/adammhaile/Elpis

you can use twitchls.com to see pure html5 twitch (I use it from linux)

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