Hacker News Reader

I get the same, and it's not dependent on ISP. Many (most?) flash players are buggy resource hogs, and the html5 implementations I've seen don't feel ready for primetime yet.

View on HN

(Former) Flash nerd here. The problems with plackback and scrubbing are absolutely the fault of the Flash player and there's really nothing you can do about it short of hacking your own video handling into the SWF format. There are a lot of low-level network-related problems in Flash.

I have zero real proof, but I know for a long time Adobe (Macromedia) was pushing their streaming server and didn't really put a lot of effort into handling streaming/buffering without it and I suspect this just never got fixed as things were "good enough".

To be fair, there weren't many (any?) standardized alternatives back then. There was no particular incentive for Adobe to support, say, Red5 when there was no standard to gather around. Apple's HLS is a pretty recent attempt at moving toward a documented standard.

If you're talking about streaming .flvs off of a regular Apache setup, then it shouldn't be surprising that scrubbing and seeking are troublesome: static file servers weren't build for that use case.

What would you have preferred Adobe to have done?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com