Player team update here, 6pm Saturday Pacific:
http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/2010/02/flash_bug_repor...
23 karma · joined October 30, 2008
Dave McAllister has a single-screen summary, and I've got some background history, both with plenty of links: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail... http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_for...
I've been wondering about the recent change myself. Considering that it's not election season, it seems prudent to wonder about the sudden flood of unverifiable identities in discussion forums. Hard to tell, but necessary to wonder.
We don't know that you're not shilling.
Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.
On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...
Then you'd have to do version-checks, if you're actually delivering content to audiences. Fewer people have it, fewer people use the current version. Most codecs on content sites are H.264 or On2 VP6 (successor to Theora). Easier to solicit Apple to open up their acceleration APIs to plugins.
<em>"The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written."</em>
You're quite incorrect.
Kevin's stats were comparing CPU-decompression of video, which should get closer to parity.
Apple's APIs would be easier to use, were they to provide guidance and resources more like Microsoft does. Stark difference.
I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.
But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)
If people were straight up, and focused on trying to solve a problem, that'd be one thing. Sudden swells of anonymous turfing is another. Apple won't even go on-the-record with their executive-level smears, for goshsakes... what kind of corporate culture is that?
Crashing seems to be mostly directly correlated with pseudonymous Apple-polishing on webforums.... ;-)
(btw, if you're sincerely trying to improve your own experience, there's a quick set of diagnostics here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_sta... )
I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)
For Maemo, see earlier on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090855
(Noise & disinfo levels seem at all-time highs recently... Engadget may merely be the first site of many to adapt.)
Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.
(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)
AAPL and GOOG can use VIDEO tag for H.264-encoded video.
Mozilla and Opera can use VIDEO tag for Ogg Theora encoded video.
There are two distinct implementations: VIDEO/H.264 and VIDEO/Theora. Neither supports the other.
You got suckered by the "'HTML5' VIDEO" talk. Not your fault; even its proponents didn't address such video basics until it became too late.
The frothiness of the "'HTML5' VIDEO" talk requires a significant amount of research to determine the reality-of-the-week.
It's much better than it was, and about to become even moreso. The major part of work over the past year has been invisible to you so far, but cross-device predictability is coming from almost every major manufacturer this year.
The Apple problems are only partly about technology.
From what I understand, Nokia adapted an older Adobe Linux codebase to the smaller device, and implemented it as a plugin to their browser. Nokia is currently a major partner in the Open Screen Project, and is poised to take advantage of the mobile optimizations in the upcoming Player 10.1 release.
So, oddly, I'd tend to agree with the earlier poster, than we haven't seen fruits of Mobile Flash work recently. But now in Jan10, it's almost showtime.... ;-)
Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona in February. That should be the coming-out party for the entire next generation, and shipments will ramp up through 2010.
You don't have to believe it. But that's what I've seen.
(I was sort of relieved to see YouTube take the beta off... brings the conversation down from the clouds and into reality.)
<em>"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."</em> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...
For the "why", that's Adobe Corp's tale to tell, but I haven't yet met a person inside Adobe who wouldn't be very, very happy if Mac/Win performance differences could be made to disappear.