Twitch Is Ditching Flash For HTML5, Just Like YouTube 93
An anonymous reader writes: Twitch is becoming the latest to transition from Adobe Flash to HTML5. Twitch will start to release its HTML5-based video player controls slowly and in small increments. The video underneath the controls will still be powered by Flash for now. Twitch says this is "an important step to releasing the much-anticipated full HTML5 player" and to "stay tuned for more HTML5 updates."
Why are websites dragging their feet on this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, even many websites that still require Flash for desktop browsers will happily send HTML5 video to mobile browsers.
For example, the BBC. You go to videos on BBC and it says "Plugin required", so I go up and change my User Agent to iPad, and *WHAM*, the video plays using HTML5 without a problem.
THE CODE IS ALREADY DONE!!!! Why don't they just throw the switch?
Re:Why are websites dragging their feet on this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Flash supports better "supercookies" and user tracking, especially across domains when the embedded Flash content is sourced from a common advertising provider.
Follow the money. The money is always the answer.
This (Score:2)
mod Anon up ...
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Give Anon a medal...
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Anon for president!
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"HTML5 session storage"
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The same can be done on other operating systems. It's a matter of doing it, or even knowing to do it in the first place.
There was a time when I'd say "yeah, Linux users are more security conscious and will set up a cronjob for that" but you might be surprised at the number of non-technical people running Mint and Ubuntu these days. They don't know what cron is, or what a dotfile or a dot directory is, or why they need to inspect and purge crap out of there, any more than the average Windows user checks thei
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THE CODE IS ALREADY DONE!!!! Why don't they just throw the switch?
Good question. I don't know the answer, but there's probably a reason.
Bandwidth? Is the flash version lighter than html5? Better buffering? Better caching?
Client performance? Does the flash version run smoother on older hardware?
Features? Is the flash version more functional? (Pause, volume controls, seek, etc..?)
Advertising? Is the flash version integrated with their advertising while html5 is not (yet)?
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THE CODE IS ALREADY DONE!!!! Why don't they just throw the switch?
Good question. I don't know the answer, but there's probably a reason.
Most likely due to the hand full of people still on Windows XP and using IE8. At my work when I updated one of our websites a few months ago to something more modern, a customer called and complained because it wasn't rendering correctly. He was using IE8 and refused to use anything else. Sadly my boss forced me to return to our 2005 style website all because of one dipshit person.
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I can't help wondering what's so special about IE8 that someone would refuse to upgrade from it.
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Windows XP does not allow installation of Internet Explorer versions later than 8.
Re: Why are websites dragging their feet on this? (Score:1)
I guess half the internal sites she has to use will only work with IE6
Re: Why are websites dragging their feet on this? (Score:1)
Re:Why are websites dragging their feet on this? (Score:4, Informative)
Google's stewardship of HTML 5 video has been so shaky that nobody trusts the standards they've helped implement. There's also the case that Safari and iOS need custom streams until they support Dash/MSE/EME properly, and other such fragmentation, so it's pretty much a guarantee that Flash and/or Silverlight are the safer bet depending on your content. Now that Google has strong-armed Firefox into supporting MSE (whether it's barely functional or not) it seems likely that Apple will fall into line as well, so it's becoming more of a realistic proposition. Had Google done a better job on the whole thing then we would have had HTML5 video years ago.
Re:Why are websites dragging their feet on this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is in the process of killing off NPAPI plugins completely (like Flash, Java etc), and that API will be completely gone in a couple months. Websites better get rid of all the flash stuff soon, and HTML 5 is the replacement.
I applaud Google for forcing the industry forward.
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I tried switching to HTML5 on youtube for a while... (using firefox) worked fine on shorter (less than 30min) videos, maybe a bit longer, but when I got to hour+ long ones the video stream would consistently stop somewhere around the 30=40min mark and I'd be stuck looking at a static image while the audio continued playing flawlessly.
A Firefox bug most certainly, and 39 still has something at least similar to it. Smells like a resource (memory) leak to me. I kill Firefox and restart when it happens, then it's fine for a while. More than a bit pathetic that those longstanding leaks haven't been hunted down and killed after all these years. I mean, where do those tens of millions of dollars that Mozilla foundation supposedly pours into development actually go? I suspect, mostly into non-dev pockets.
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Well, not very quickly from what I've seen. I recently installed Chrome on a Windows machine & it has Flash baked in. You can disable it, but you can't remove it.
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You can disable it, but you can't remove it.
Much like Winston's TV then.
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Chrome doesn't rely on a plugin for flash, it has a player built-in. I seriously doubt they'd have killed NPAPI support otherwise.
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"I applaud Google for forcing the industry forward."
After Steve Jobs started the outcry against Flash, you mean.
Continued the outcry, you mean.
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Flash on Chrome doesn't use NPAPI it uses PPAPI, is distributed and updated with the browser, and isn't going anywhere so far.
That said there are things Google might do to discourage Flash content, such as quit running / displaying it by default.
http://www.extremetech.com/com... [extremetech.com]
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...so it's pretty much a guarantee that Flash and/or Silverlight are the safer bet
My response. [youtube.com]
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Now that Google has strong-armed Firefox into supporting MSE (whether it's barely functional or not) it seems likely that Apple will fall into line as well, so it's becoming more of a realistic proposition.
It's hard to see why Mozilla had to be strong-armed. It looks like a perfectly reasonable W3C recommendation to me. Is there some gotcha that escapes a quick perusal?
BTW, is Silverlight still a thing? I thought it zombified a couple years back.
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We have a Vendor at work ("I've fallen and I can't get up buttons") who's entire site is Silver light based. I'm not sure what we are going to do either as this is local government... change takes 3 months to a year before it clears the necessary beauracracy.
The limiting factor is the speed at which zombies shuffle.
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It is because the various html5 video players are mostly crap and incomplete and incompatible with each other.
Youtube has the resources to keep 3 copies of every video in different formats but it is giant pita for everyone else.
And god help you if you want to stream live rather than pre-recorded video.
Sorry, but html5 video is *still* not ready.
Which browsers break the HTML5 spec? (Score:2)
Per Mozilla's description of the <video> element [mozilla.org]:
Then it may or not start playing automatically
The autoplay attribute of the <video> element controls this. Which browser autoplays even if the autoplay attribute is not specified?
Some systems may display a play/pause/bla bar, others will not.
The controls attribute of the <video> element controls this. Which browser shows controls if the controls attribute is not specified or hides controls if the controls attribute is specified? But I'll grant that live streaming is more likely to need custom JavaScript controls.
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And I've argued this point to our creatives who finally caved. Why should you dictate how the video player looks? The user chose the browser, partially based on how it looks and feels, and you feel you know better on what they will like than what they've already picked? Nope. You want video, you can pick the size of the area it plays in, and let the user continue to use the controls they want and are already familiar with.
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Interesting, because I've been serving HTML5 video for about 2 years without a problem. We used to encode to three different formats, but now we only use H.264 exclusively.
The problem with HTML5 for video (Score:4, Informative)
For live video, there is no working standard. HLS is used by Safari on Mac, iOS, supposedly MS Edge (I haven't tested to see how well supported it is) and is very buggy in Android (to the point of being unusable). There are some data injector APIs for the latest versions of FF and Chrome where there have been attempts to implement HLS and DASH, but they are buggy at best and not suitable for production. Additionally, using HTTP based streaming standards (such as HLS) for fully live results in very long delays (up to 30 seconds) Trying to use overly small segments to reduce latency results in video breaking up unless the latency between server and client is extremely low.
For long format on demand video, there is an enormous amount of wasted bandwidth as the MOOV atom of an MP4 is transmitted before the video is playable. For a short video, the MOOV atom is small. For an 8 hour video, the MOOV atom can be huge. This presents a problem for support of long format video for people on slower or metered connections.
The only thing the video tag does somewhat consistently across platforms is play back h.264 baseline+aac MP4 on demand videos that are relatively short format .
None of these problems exist with flash. Seamless switching between bit rates is also an issue (works well on fully implemented HLS clients, but generally a problem everywhere else). In the mean time, to support live the best bet is often RTSP on most android (or a commercial third party HLS library deployed in an app), HLS on iOS, some TV devices and on the few supported browsers on desktop and flash for everything else on desktop (where there are player implementations that support HLS).
Yes, flash has a history of security problems. There are still many things that it does much better and more consistently than HTML/JS. I'd love to dump it, but there aren't any solutions that work well for live without a plugin across all platforms.
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None of these problems exist with flash.
Flash has other problems:
- Major security holes
- Incredible resource hog that will hang your browser to load some stupid ad.
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It's less hassle to just uninstall flash.
I don't miss it.
Re: The problem with HTML5 for video (Score:1)
The problem with HTML5 for video/comment/Thank you. The children here should gather round to listen to what grown folk have to say. This ain't no bullshit, kiddies. Your vine/youtube/vimeo shit is cute, but let the real men tell you how shit is. Try a live stream to 5000 users. HTML5 player fail. Try an 8-hour VOD clip where 95% of users bail after 30 seconds. HTML5 progessive download fail. HTML5 video has much promise, but we are years away from its dominance.
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The problem with VLC is just this one. "To view this porn video, download Fake_VLC_Media_PLayer.exe".
Or the totem plugin is launched (on a linux desktop) which is slow, crashy, doesn't work and makes the whole screen blank for an instant on loading.
There was a short window in time where I got WMV streaming working (instead of "windows media player failed to download the codec"). That was back when you downloaded codecs to watch video, and so there was that .exe file from Microsoft you could download to read
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But we can't block HTML5 videos like Flash!
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Let's just write automatic updates at each startup into the standard, and Adobe will be on board.
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I've been youtubing flash-free using Firefox for months now.
Caveat: This may require you to create an account and set an option somewhere.
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Amazon's Fire TV is a piece of hardware. Use of "the" with hardware sounds more justified to me than use of "the" with software (which is considered the title of a work).
Why so many flash sites ? (Score:4, Interesting)
But with the recent security zero-days Ubuntu implemented an ask first policy. And I now see the message on virtually every friggin' website, even text-only sites. Why do so many websites use flash for things that the user doesn't need ? I can understand for videos or games, but for a forum...
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Flash cookies, probably. Maybe ads, on some sites.
Re:Why so many flash sites ? (Score:4, Interesting)
For a long time, it was simply assumed that ALL users had Flash installed, and it was more or less true (statistically speaking). So, why not show Flash ads as well, since you can animate them, make them interactive, have them spit out sound, and all sorts of other annoying things?
You're only now starting to see a minor trend of people (like me) uninstalling or others blocking Flash by default.
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Youtube's rapid growth was probably because they made streaming video that Just Worked(tm), seeing how loads of people had Flash installed. There were whole bunch of video streaming protocols around at the time, most depending on plugins that were pretty shit, like RealPlayer.
Times have changed.
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Mainly because of Flash Super Cookies (Score:2)
Or more properly called Local Shared Objects [wikipedia.org]
Flash is the Confederate Flag of the internet (Score:4, Funny)
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I disagree on both counts.
Lots of people like Flash: lots of websites still use it for various reasons (*cough* tracking *cough*), so obviously those people like it. And lots of Slashdotters like it too: just look at all the comments above: there's a ton of people here defending it. So it's definitely false that *nobody* likes Flash.
As for the Confederate flag, you may be correct about "most people" not liking it, but there's still a very large number of Americans who do, and have taken to flying this fla
WebM (Score:1)
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I don't want to be a grammar nazi but technically you are comparing apples to oranges.
WebM is a container format, not a codec.
The codec you are talking about is probably: VP8.
An other newer codec also exitst VP9 which is better than H.264.
But obviously it's trying to compete with H.265. The gap between VP9 and H.265 is a lot smaller than between VP8 and H.264. Actually the gap is still getting smaller. VP9 is still improving. H.265 not so much.
Grave-comm (Score:1)
"I told you so." - Steve Jobs
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"I told you so." -- Dead Steve Jobs
FTFY.
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Yeah, unlike the masses, I stream my games on a site so obscure, you've probably never heard of it.
HTML5 is it (Score:1)
Adobe still has its clutches on flash, and its premiere which refuse to support it officially, same with apple. But lets take a look [dropboxusercontent.com] at what does support it. Wow, only apple and IE, fancy that.
Adding to the fact imgur and 'gfycat' try and fence s