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Comment by erichurkman | Hacker News Reader

At least one major component is moving off of Flash: videos.

Now, if you opt to forgo Flash on your device, the most you seem to miss are some games and annoying banner ads.

Unfortunately, as far as I know there's still no decent solution to stream video without flash (I'm talking Twitch et al here). Twitch is the only reason I still have flash on my computer (and not actually for watching games being streamed, but for the annual Desertbus event).

Has the HTML5 video streaming improved at all over the past year?

I also kept Flash around mainly for this reason. It doesn't help people that want to make streaming video sites, but you don't need Flash to watch live video streams from sites like twitch.tv. You just need a media player capable of playing streaming video (mpc-hc, mpv, and vlc all work), and the livestreamer command line tool which extracts direct video stream URLs from twitch.tv pages.

http://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/

This works perfectly for me, arguably better than the Flash-based player. I uninstalled Flash a few months ago and haven't felt the need since.

I am aware of the VLC workaround. But I like Twitch enough that I'll actually watch their ads, as I think they're reasonably placed etc. So until they're implementing a flash-free solution (and I'm sure they're interested in doing so), I'll just keep flash around for them.

Is there any client option for iPhone users to view streaming Flash video?

There's Media Source Extensions, but it's a draft standard with limited support currently.

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