Hacker News Reader

Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic news and congrats to the NY Times team.

Does anyone know, who at this point still continues to use Flash?

Pretty much every music streaming service I know of. There were a few that used HTML5, but all of them shut down (most recently rdio).

For Spotify, there's a years old request on the forums [0] their support keeps linking people to, but it doesn't seem like they're doing anything about it.

Deezer uses Flash for "security reasons" [1] and they don't plan to use HTML5.

Someone mentioned Google Play might work, but I haven't tried that yet.

0: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Integrate-HTML5-...

1: https://twitter.com/Deezer/status/539344616580194304

Google Play Music does work without flash but it's a "Labs" feature.

Thanks for the tip...apparently it doesn't work on Firefox, or doesn't work on Linux, or something. I found the switch to enable it, but it's grayed out.

I was painfully annoyed when Songza shut down and redirected to Google Play Music. Songza worked happily without Flash, but Play Music requires it (so far). Also, Play Music has more intrusive ads than Songza.

Most of the German public broadcasters still use Flash (arte, ZDFMediathek, 3sat is one giant flash-blob etc.)

The most infuriating one is NDR, because they allow you to switch between Flash and HTML5 video. However, if you don't have Flash installed, it doesn't give you that option or falls back to HTML5 (which would be reasonable) but instead throws an error telling you to get Flash. Yup, you need to install Flash so you can disable Flash.

Some of those sites use an open source player (I forgot the name). They actually changed the default priority order and put Flash first, so if Flash is installed (not necessarily enabled!) it will use Flash in favor of HTML5.

Firefox used to have an option that overwrites the list of plugins reported to JavaScript. Sadly it was disabled a few versions back.

Edit: The player is Projekktor [0], the FF setting was plugins.enumerable_names [1]. There's a new option coming that hides plugins when set to click-to-play [2]

0: https://github.com/frankyghost/projekktor

1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1169945

2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1186948

The BBC still do which I find infuriating...

I think it you tell your browser to claim its an iPad there is magically much more HTML 5 video content on the BBC.

Indeed. Frustrates the HELL out of me even more because all their videos are available in web-friendly MP4 for the mobile services and you can get to them if you spoof the user agent. I wish they would just let me toggle a "beta" feature or something.

I'm 99% sure they introduced a non-flash service in beta recently.

Edit: Yeah, you can opt-in with a button on the right column here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/html5

Only for iPlayer, not for example on BBC News video clips, and not even 100% of iPlayer content yet. Still progress I suppose.

True. Hopefully this is a test and once they get it working they'll roll it out across the BBC sites.

Yes I was aware of the iPlayer HTML5 opt-in which is what I was hoping to see for the rest of the site. Given that they have all the content in HTML5-friendly video anyway it shouldn't be all that painful.

Twitch.tv, sadly.

There's Beam [0], it's quite new but I've been quite amazed by their work. They invented some sort of own protocol built on web standards [1]. Also, their streams are actually live (i.e. minimal delay), it's all HTTPS and a lot of their work is open source. [2]

I hope this is going to be a thing.

0: https://beam.pro

1: http://forums.beam.pro/topic/168/where-we-re-at-with-html5-v...

2: https://github.com/watchbeam

Thanks for the link. Looks neat, but sadly doesn't seem to be working in Firefox for Linux. Don't have time to dig into why right now (missing MSE? some codec I don't have?)

It wasn't working for me when I `had media.fragmented-mp4.*.enabled` turned on. Started working again after turning it off.

Other than that, I think they're A/B testing some experimental features. Perhaps try a few different streams and see if those work?

We're working on the switch (I announced at TwitchCon). It's particularly hard for live video, but that's just an excuse. Clearly the time has come.

Jerry Seinfeld on comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com

Only on desktop, on mobile it must be showing an MP4 file since it works on the iPhone.

The superbowl website requested flash to be installed.

ESPN does and it's dreadful.

Pandora

:-/ tinychat.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com