Google moves to replace Flash with HTML5
bitmovin.com
bitmovin.com
DRM has never been important for online video workflow and it's only useful in the way a walled garden is useful... it will require that each pair of browser-website (with EME) negotiate before allowing it, basically making it impossible for smaller browsers to become useful at all
The whole reason for Flash's tenacity in the video market was its thorough support for DRM. This is decidedly _not_ an advantage of HTML5.
Yes it has. Always.
Netflix is competing with free and winning -- they've created something that's actually more convenient than piracy. I can already download everything on Netflix from my friendly local piracy site, but I don't because the eight bucks a month is worth less than the time I would waste pirating it.
Hell, Netflix could put a download button next to all their content and I bet it wouldn't affect piracy. The value isn't in the content but the distribution network that's so good even pirates can't compete with it.
Your "I can already download everything on Netflix from my friendly local piracy site" works, but the other way around doesn't. I've been a Netflix user for years, but I'm on the verge of unsubscribing, because I realized that since January I've only watched House of Cards.
I question this assertion as Netflix used to use torrent trends as a decision input for deciding what content to purchase: https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-uses-pirate-sites-to-determ...
I can also offer anecdotal evidence that the piracy rates of my college social network dramatically decreased as the affordability and content quality of Netflix increased.
Netflix is being squeezed by media publishers which is why they started publishing their own content. I still hope that streaming services like Netflix will win and reshape the market...but it is a difficult fight.
On the note of you only having watched "House of Cards", there are a bunch of Netflix shows I could recommend for you if you're interested. "Peaky Blinders" comes to mind immediately since we are due for another season at the end of this month.
Unfortunately, it seems like netflix's desire to open their catalogue at all decreases year after year. Their competitors are even worse in this respect.
My TV provider recently "upgraded" the interface on their set top boxes to one that is so slow and poorly laid out that I've just stopped watching two premium channel shows because it now takes five minutes to navigate to the point that I can watch anything, and am going to stop subscribing to those channels. This is DRM costing them viewers and money.
To make a possibly-emotionally-charged analogy, it's like patent licenses for free software. In a perfect world, software patents wouldn't exist. But in the world we live in now, you cannot build practical systems without acknowledging that they do exist and they need to be dealt with, and that you need to be as clear about patent rights as you are about copyright. So e.g. the Apache License and GPLv3 have some text about software patents and how they interact. It is hugely important for some people (depending on their jurisdiction, quality of counsel, amount they care, etc.) that they use licenses like those that acknowledge software patents. That's not to say that software patents are inherently useful, and certainly we should work towards a world where they're not, but if you're building a real project, you have to work with the world as it is.
In the world we live in, the people who own the content that lots of people want to see have decided that they care about DRM. Whether they should care about DRM (or whether the viewers should want to view that content, for that matter) is beside the point for the discussion of whether DRM is currently useful. By all means—including the means of making DRM technically cumbersome—convince them to stop caring about DRM. But the ability to provide DRM is, unfortunately, useful today.
It's useful in the sense that snake oil is useful after somebody signs a contract to use snake oil. That doesn't mean it's actually useful, it means somebody signed a dumb contract.
When that happens you can go out and take bids from snake oil suppliers and rub snake oil on your skin every day that does nothing but cost money and make you smell bad, or you can fix the contract.
EME does abosolutely nothing to prevent piracy and only serves as another roadblock for people to jump before seeing videos.
1. Makes it easier for them to control access by legitimate customers. Yes, this is pretty always consumer hostile BS, but it's a use case.
2. If someone does come up with an app to download shows or whatever, they have the legal argument of "you broke DRM to do this".
Piracy [probably] isn't a problem for you, but if you think it isn't a problem at all, then you should read this:
http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...
Whether or not piracy is a problem is immaterial to the importance of DRM if DRM has no effect on piracy.
The people that would view paid content should not be punished with DRM, that only works on certain platforms and certain browsers.
It actually makes pirated product much better than original. Pirated videos besides being free work on all platforms, you can view it on your computer, phone, tablet. Living or visiting a different country does not revoke your rights to see it, and you can make as many copies of it as you want.
In Chrome and Firefox, you can't watch Netflix above 720p. It's why I must use IE with Silverlight to watch Netflix at full HD on Windows 7.
Oh my god, the horror!
It's a far superior experience.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/netflix/9wzdncrfj...
But, they give themselves a free pass, as their own "webpage guidelines" page is 3.4 megabytes long! But, even worse, it has a video on a carousel that repeatedly downloads the video whenever it restarts the video loop.
which is true whether they give a boost to themselves or not.
That's probably it. Then again, it's not just Google that has to deal with legacy applications. So yeah, if you're going to shove this policy in the name of open standards, dog-food it and deal with the same pain countless of companies will have to.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG
I really wish they didn't leave it to rot.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.nl/2016/04/google-play-music-st...
YouTube encodes all their content with in multiple formats: AAC and Opus, H.264 and VP9. I don't know why Google Play Music can't encode their music streams in both MP3 and Opus. They would save on bandwidth by using Opus.
Here is the Firefox bug to add support for MP3 in MSE: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1169485
EDIT: Tested this out on opera and it works fine. Does it have anything to do with blink?
Site even says when viewing without flash:"For the ubercool interactive charts, you need to install the Adobe Flash Player"
Maybe Google should look into .. Google Charts?
It's also somewhat good for the web since both of those platforms are competitors and companies often reuse things they've already invested in.
It is unequivocally bad that it poses a risk to Mozilla but the real problem isn't EME but rather the fact that all of the DRM opposition since the 90s has failed to move public opinion much. As long as customers happily pay for DRMed content and three of the major browsers are made by DRM vendors, the most likely alternative to Flash is a proprietary interface. The fact that EME is standardized at least gives the EFF better grounds for demanding consistent treatment.
AFAIK, You need EME to make sure that only browsers that have the Foo-Corporation EME plugin can play Foo-Corporation videos.
And to get the EME plugin for a browser, you need to ask permissions from Foo-Corporation to have it. So anyone writing a new browers (like Mozilla did with what became Firefox) will have to ask for this permission and will likely not just get it.
Seems like another example of where big companies got to where they are because the space they moved into was wide and open and free. But now that they have claimed that space and divided it up amongst a few players, they'll do their damned best to fence it of, wall it in and make sure none else can ever move into ever again.
I'm quite aware of that but consider it from the perspective of a normal user using a non-Apple/Google/Microsoft browser:
1. Click on a link on YouTube, Hulu, etc. It's not DRMed, so it just works.
2. The next thing in the playlist is DRMed (e.g. it's premium, owned by a more restrictive publisher, etc.) and it doesn't play.
For people like us, step 3 might be “Decide you didn't want to play it that much” or “Complain to the provider”.
For the vast majority of users, step 3 is more like “Give up on Firefox and use Chrome/Edge/Safari”. How many of them will eventually stop using Firefox in the first place?
That's the real problem here – even if Firefox had 90% marketshare, it would evaporate quickly because switching is easy, users have a bunch of reasonable quality options, and most users don't feel that they're getting a bad deal.
EDIT: note that I'm not saying this is how I'd like it to work, only that anyone who thinks DRM is unjust needs to think about the millions of Netflix subscribers and both why and how those people should spend their $9/month elsewhere.
You don't need EME "just to play video". HTML5-video without EME can do that just fine.
It is only when you conflate video playback with DRM then that argument somewhat works.
Philosophical arguments about what "video" "needs" are all very well, but the side that actually provides users with the content they want where they want it will be the side that wins, and very quickly.
(Back in the day, we had a client who was working on a BeOS appliance. Plugins were a big deal since things like Flash were theoretically portable but Adobe wasn't going to talk with you for less than a certain dollar amount)
In the music space, opposition to DRM was very successful.
The same could have been true for video, we'll never know, because Google, Microsoft, and Netflix created EME.
Yes, it is dishonest of Google to keep referring to 'the Open Web' when 'HTML5 video' is heading towards being simply an enabler for other proprietary plug-ins.
The Open Web of binary blobs.
Google has been really dishonest about their moves to the Open Web.
The notion that some parts of the web standard are pay-to-play is actually not new.
Interestingly if you put a TV using cable next to a TV using satellite the satellite TV will trail cable by 2-3 seconds sometimes just from the amount of time to bounce the signal off of satellites.
Bug report is here - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=911837 - It's been a while since I looked into it and looks like the details have changed recently. At least a quick attempt now tells me "Please refresh this page in your browser to get back to listening to your music. If issues persist, make sure you have Flash enabled and working."
By which I mean, a standard that works cross-browser? ;)
YouTube encodes all their content with in multiple formats: AAC and Opus, H.264 and VP9. I don't know why Google Play Music can't encode their music streams in both MP3 and Opus. They would save on bandwidth by using Opus.
Here is the Firefox bug to add support for MP3 in MSE: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1169485
There are game engines now that can compile to a pure HTML / css/ Javascript runtime.
Flash is a known attack vector. I'd be more comfortable with the argument "Kids should be free to play games" if I didn't have to keep purging virii off my aunt's computer because she won't stop visiting Flash game sites.
Besides, there are alternative browsers. If kids need to drop into Edge to play Flash games, that seems like an acceptable solution? If it isn't possible (because they're on a school network that whitelists browsers, for example), that's indicative of the cost / benefit tradeoff of that use case.
Anyway, a couple of things from the article...
> "Netflix have already switched to HTML5...due to the benefits of HTML5 based streaming"
> "...HTML5 outperforms plugin based playback in almost every department"
> "...delivering high bandwidth products such as 360° video and Virtual Reality in a more efficient manor."
Such generic statements! Netflix HTML5 playback in both Chrome and Firefox is limited to 720p. That's not a benefit and is why I must use silverlight in IE on Windows 7 to watch 1080p Netflix. They really should cover things like this to better reflect how things actually are.
The claims about HTML5 performance over plugins should only come from people who have done side by side comparisons. So many bloggers telling it according to something they read somewhere.
Finally, "360° video in a more efficient manor". I like efficient manors, even bad manors, but again this claim should be backed up with evidence. If you look at VR, if you look at 360 video, the evidence for better performance in HTML5 for these technologies is simply not there. Even with still image panoramas, anyone who has made these in something like KrPano will know that Flash panoramas generally outperform HTML5 panoramas. Smoother motion, better memory management, better cross-browser performance. We may wish it weren't so, but we should get facts straight regardless of whether it leaves HTML (which we love) a little bruised in the comparison.
(FWIW here's where Adobe Captivate is with HTML5 support: https://helpx.adobe.com/captivate/using/publish-projects-htm...)
Though I don't disagree at all, transitioning from one proprietary, single-vendor, closed-source plugin to another isn't actually going to solve the problems that killing Flash is supposed to solve (apart from the one where Flash is also a gigantic legacy-code monument to all our sins, of course ;) ).
From what I remember it's not as performant or reliable as the plugin, so there's some work to be done on unity's end. Beyond that, if browser makers want to replace native code plugins they have to give a better alternative. WebAssembly might help, but since it's essentially running in the same vm as JS I'm not sure it'll be faster other than the parsing overhead.
... two things that absolutely kill videogames, so it's more accurate to say "Unity you will output WebGl-based games" (at some indeterminate point in the future).
Agreed that it's a step in the right direction over alternatives though.
Getting really frustrated with all the things chrome is starting to change.
We are starting to become a bunch of sheep, if google wants something, they announce it, and implement it, we developers, users have to fall in line and start doing everything they want.
What the hell is going on, why are we not pissed off about this. Look I hate Flash as much as the other guy, but blocking an extention just because a company doesn't like it. How long before we see adblockers, anti piracy trackers and basically anything that a company like google will see as a threat get blocked.
Don't give me that "Oh flash has security holes so we are blocking it." Yeh when our governments use this same excuse we are all up in arms, but when a company does this many are okay with it.
The sad sad truth is majority of users are going to fall in line whenever a company decides what's best for them.
</rant>
And to all the fan-boys/girls down-voting me. Have the decency to leave a comment as to why you are downvoting.
Going on about getting downvoted breaks the HN guidelines, as does name-calling. Please (re-)read them and don't do this.
> We are starting to become a bunch of sheep
You might be, but not all of us are.
> why are we not pissed off about this
About them blocking (but still bundling) flash in 2016? I'd honestly be more questioning why they ever bundled it in the first place. I use Safari and have not installed Flash in.. years.
But if you mean pissed off about Google using it's position of power to arbitrarily decide what technology "wins" and "loses" - people are pissed off. Unfortunately, there is seemingly an entire generation of developers who are somehow perpetually convinced Google is the second coming of jesus, and that anything they do must be a good thing.
I've seen developers who will argue that they use emacs/vim over a full IDE "because now I'm not reliant, I can work on a server if i need to" and then use Google for fucking everything. So the lesson is, you can't become dependent on something you actually have control over, like a laptop, but it's fine to become dependent on a mega-corporation that has a history of just abandoning shit because nothing ever lives up to the ridiculous amounts of profits made by being a creepy personal data collecting tracker of fucking everything.
Regardless of your thoughts about flash, this is the perfect opportunity to explore the world outside google. Other browsers exist. Other search engines exist. Other ad networks (and less fucking creepy ones) exist. Go forth. Be adventurous. Be free. Seriously.
Anyone who thinks Google's level of control on the web (search engine, browser, data centres, home internet connections, mobile phones) isn't a massive risk is kidding themselves.
Edit: for clarity, I'm not arguing that the situation isn't fucked, just saying, don't lie down and accept it. Also, have an up vote, because, you know, the voting system here is fucked.
Google bundles Flash with Chrome so they can push out Flash security updates quickly and seamlessly.
Adobe's non-Chrome Flash Player has its own update check, but it's not automatic. The "updater" just opens the adobe.com download page. The user must still manually download the real updater exe, unselect any "special offers", run the updater from wherever their browser saved it, and restart their non-Chrome browser.
I wonder how common Flash would still be if Google hadn't bundled Flash (and paid Google security engineers fuzz and fix Flash bugs).
I think categorizing it as winners and losers is wrong. As much ribbing as google gets, I think very often, they are using their position of power to make the internet more secure and functional. They won't get it right every time, but I'm happy to see them try.
* It's a single-vendor/proprietary runtime.
* It's not even available for mobile. Most of the content that uses it is made for desktops.
* It's a black box.
* It doesn't work great on platforms Adobe doesn't prioritize (if it's even available).
* We have to wait for Adobe to fix bugs and vulnerabilities.
All Chrome is doing here is phasing out the Flash Player runtime.
Even when support is dropped entirely you can still use something like OpenFL and/or Haxe and target the web with it if you still want to use your Flash skills.
If we all had browsers without Flash and someone came along and suggested adding it, what would your argument be? I don't see why our default should be not changing things when everyone knows the better technical answer is changing it.
It's their browser, they can do what they like.
Oh the US government is spying on its own citizens? It's their country, they can do as they like.
They have control over a lot of what people see online, by virtue of controlling what people find when they search. They're so ingrained in society that they're a verb. Their staff have had remarkable access to the White House and other government institutions.
No, not a monopoly...but they're not far from potentially becoming one.
Flash while it is indeed a piece of garbage, has done a lot for the internet, there are many places of the internet that are flash dependent.
Some companies are still using flash in their internal systems, how do you justify breaking something that works for so many people?
Now think of IE6 deprecation.
This is necessary because its the only way to progress forward.
The fact this is a price Chrome is willing to pay indicates just how dead Flash is, and how much browser vendors are willing to kill it.
The sad reality is, there are are many companies that depend on flash for their corporate software. We all hear horror stories where IE6 has to be supported.
While I whole heartedly agree flash is something I would avoid like the plague it is not the reality for many companies. Think about it, at one point we all though flash was the cool new thing, but now almost everyone we know hates it. But if you force thousands of companies to replace their software just becuase another company does not want to support an ancient technology, it should ring alarm bells for us all. It would cost billions of dollars in upgrades if we consider all the companies that would be effected.
Google has to be put on the spotlight when they make changes such as these that would effect many people they have to give a good reason other-than, "oh its old, has many security bugs."
Google has to stop forcing everyone to conform to what they think is a best practice. They need to go through the proper channels, they need to get people like the etf, w3c and take these actions in a democratic way.
Google is slowly moving away from what made many of us love them, "Don't be evil" google was our hero in a time we had to put up with companies like Microsoft. It makes me incredibly mad to see a company I loved turn in to the companies they replaced.
The solution to those in the aggregate is not "Maintain IE6 backwards-compatibility forever." The challenge associated with that is why they're horror stories. But that's the opposite of what you're describing here; IE6 being supported ad-nauseum was necessary because MS had a bunch of non-compatible proprietary features in IE6 that didn't match to web standards. Google is trying to move out of supporting a non-web-standards architecture.
I'm confused about what aspect of minimizing the attack vector on a standard user's computer fails to meet "Don't be evil" as a motto. Is it the part where minimizing the attack vector for people who don't have a need for Flash collides badly with the needs of people who do have a need for Flash? People who still have a need for Flash have alternate user agents available to them; they don't need Chrome.
I'm sorry this change means you're going to have to account for your enterprise's reliance on Flash. I have friends who had to maintain code backwards-compatibility to pre-generics versions of Java. Enterprises gonna enterprise; we should neither hang the cutting edge nor the common person use-case on the relative lethargy of large companies.
It's also proven so many times over to be a mass of security vulnerabilities.
Looks like they also have signal to suggest it's a gamble worth taking.
They're already blocked on Android Chrome browser.
http://i.imgur.com/9Cxirzy.png
It worked fine before they re-wrote it. Now I have to turn on the flash plugin and the whole thing runs slow and feels clunky. Why google?
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce this reliably, otherwise I'd file a bug.
> DRM is a hugely important part of the online video workflow
I agree to other commenters here who pointed the nonsense of this. DRM is not an important part of the workflow. It's a tool of corrupted groups for standards poisoning, market control and "creative" undemocratic lawmaking.
What's special about DASH that CDNs need to specially support it? Or are you talking about services that handle transcoding video and such as well?
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/DASH_Adapt...
DASH is adaptive streaming, and as such, when you select some stream from the client, CDN should support that in their infrastructure (including codecs and etc.). I don't know the details exactly, but it's far from trivial. May be someone can explain what the difficulty is in detail.
Currently CDNs support HLS and Adobe's adaptive streaming, both of which aren't open standards and aren't part of HTML5 video.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming#Ado...
Without DASH support in CDN, you can't scale your service, and to get rid of Flash and Adobe's adaptive streaming you need DASH + MSE. That's how I understood it at least.
This makes sense if the CDN is transcoding the video for you but if you do that yourself I don't think a special CDN is necessary.
From Mozilla [0]:
> DASH works via HTTP, so as long as your HTTP server supports byte range requests, and it's set up to serve .mpd files with mimetype="application/dash+xml", then you're all set.
And from encoding.com [1]:
> To play the content, the DASH client first obtains the MPD. The MPD can be delivered using HTTP [...]
> Using this information, the DASH client selects the appropriate encoded alternative and starts streaming the content by fetching the segments using HTTP GET requests.
This definitely sounds like it doesn't need any special support from the server. As long as it can serve files over HTTP, the only special thing is the transcoding and setting up the manifest, which doesn't need to be done by the CDN.
I have a feeling CDNs advertise support for HLS and Adobe's streaming because they require additional support.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/DASH_Adapt...
Not sure about others.
Adaptive streaming is essentially a client side technology, all the CDN needs to do is ensure that it serves up files with the right mime type (not actually a hard requirement, but many players choke if you don't).
Which segment to play next is decided by the player based on current playback conditions and a manifest of available segments and bitrates; it then requests the relevant segment from the CDN, which delivers it as it would a normal file. (A segment is just a very short video file).
The CDN is not expected to keep state for each connected client, which it would need to in order to be able to make the relevant decisions on which file to serve.
For live, you also have the complication that you need to keep adding files, and updating the manifest to indicate where these new files are (The payer checks back every couple of seconds to see if the manifest has changed). Any latency at all in this means that a client may get back a stale manifest, and then not know where the next video segment is supposed to come from, causing stalling. (Numerous ways to work around this, but it is the real hurdle to easy adaptive live streaming).
This is all a gross simplification, but at its most base level, that is how it works.
You can (theoretically) do MPEG-DASH from a normal MP4 file, but that does require CDN support (and possibly a single pass to add more info at segment boundaries).
> Currently CDNs support HLS and Adobe's adaptive streaming, both of which aren't open standards and aren't part of HTML5 video.
HLS is an open standard[0], though not defined by a standards body; more Apple have documented how they do it and others have adopted it as a defacto standard.
And that is the biggest hurdle for DASH adoption - Apple devices.
As a content provider, I have* to support HLS if I want to support adaptive streaming in iOS. Transcoding to another standard (one which is still in its infancy) is just asking for non essential costs and headaches.
*Yes, it is possible to use MPEG-DASH, but not natively supported by Apple, so you are on your own.
Until Apple support MPEG-DASH you still need to provide a HLS stream.
DASH is a sprawling standard, and in theory you can use DASH with existing HLS segments (MPEG-2 .ts files), but no-one supports it (or likely ever will). DASH264 [1] is an attempt to keep it simple, and tie it down to a smaller subset of codecs (x264/5 and the like), and seems to be making headway.
It's early days for MPEG-DASH, and it is gaining traction, helped by the fact it has been learnt a lot of lessons from the likes of Flash and HLS.
0: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming... 1: http://dashif.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DASH-IF-IOP-v3....
Twitch.tv does exactly that for their non-Flash streaming (MPEG2 .ts files delivered in pieces).
Twitch definitely offers HLS as well; it makes sense to support the current generation of devices, but re-use the tech stack for future standards. Clever peeps.
For a lot of codec related items support is dependent on the underlying OS, and I don't think Windows ships with a general MPEG-2 licence.
I see. Safari on iOS is still missing MSE? Is Apple doing it to slow down DASH adoption?
The other expected problem is codecs. Apple are being sleazy and refuse to support free codecs like VP9 and Opus. So making DASH serving those won't work with Apple too (unless you'll use pure JavaScript decoder which is very not optimal).
May be Daala / Thor will eventually break their nasty behavior, especially if it will be adopted as mandatory for WebRTC.
> DASH264 is an attempt to keep it simple, and tie it down to a smaller subset of codecs (x264/5 and the like), and seems to be making headway.
Tying DASH to a set of proprietary codecs to propose a standard sounds like a very bad idea. I don't see it going anywhere.
> May be Daala / Thor will eventually break their nasty behavior, especially if it will be adopted as mandatory for WebRTC.
I think AV1 (Alliance for Open Media's codec) is likely to be the video codec Apple joins in on, unless it tries to push HEVC. With Intel, AMD and ARM in the group, basically every computing device is going to have hardware support for it so Apple would have to actively cripple it in their hardware to go without.
As for audio, Opus is great for low latency and low bitrate but AAC is widely available and supported and performs better than Opus at high bitrates (which I suspect are more important to Apple than low bitrates). Maybe if Opus becomes part of a telecom spec for VoIP or something Apple will pick it up but I think it's unlikely otherwise.
AV1 is the new codename for Daala + Thor? They used to call it NetVC. I hope they'll come up with better name than something that sounds like a virus :)
> As for audio, Opus is great for low latency and low bitrate but AAC is widely available and supported and performs better than Opus at high bitrates
Opus beats AAC even for music from what I saw and provides same quality at lower bitrates. I.e. it has lower transparency level, which means it's simply better overall. See http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm
Plus AAC is not free.
No, AV1 is the name of the codec the Alliance for Open Media is producing. The Alliance for Open Media is a coalition formed by Amazon, AMD, ARM, Cisco, Google, Intel, Ittiam, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and NVIDIA [0]. I don't believe Daala is involved.
> Opus beats AAC even for music from what I saw and provides same quality at lower bitrates.
That test notably omits the proprietary Fraunhofer AAC codec, which may outperform the others.
It also produces results differing from the SoundExpert ratings [1], which show Opus and AAC both achieving transparency around 128K, but with AAC doing it by a more comfortable margin.
> Plus AAC is not free.
Freedom isn't relevant to what will be adopted. The parties in control aren't motivated by freedom.
Oh, they are. It's only the matter of scale and who owns the non-free options. If those who have adopt some codecs need to pay tons of money for non-free ones they start caring about freedom quite a bit ;)
That's exactly why HEVC shot itself in the foot and will eventually die miserably.
Yes, the Google CDN (Google owns Youtube).
Google worked around it by rolling out their own CDN. Do you propose to do the same?
On the other hand, I don't know anyone with an @some-microsoft-property email address, so I don't know whether I'll be having trouble sending things there. I can reach Gmail and Yahoo (and after getting my own /64, Comcast) without trouble, though.
EDIT: Hmmm, mail-test.com seems to be a parked domain.
Apparently eShares is having the same problem. Shareholders with Microsoft-affiliated email addresses couldn't accept certificates.
Client host blocked using FBLW15; To request removal from this list please forward this message to delist@messaging.microsoft.com (in reply to RCPT TO command)
I did as it said and forwarded the message to that address, and got an automated reply and my IP removed a few days later.
Maybe your situation is different since you're not getting a bounce message, but try emailing that address if you haven't already.
If the most popular sites bring up the click-to-play prompt, users will get frustrated quickly or habitually click.
Just to be clear; I'm in favor of ditching the include Flash by default in Chrome, but I'm not in favor of them making exceptions for certain sites. That's just horse shit.
That's because most of the tech world in the 2010s understands the difference.
Seriously, Google is as bad as every other tech company, but for some reason, when they do shit like this, people tend to over look it (not sure if because a lot of folks directly or indirectly have their livelihoods connected to Google properties or what not)
(I sometimes worry I come across as a Google apologist. I suppose I am in a devil's advocate sense. It's not that I think Google is a shining beacon of decency. It's just that the quality of anti-Google thinking on HN is so low I find it difficult to let it pass. If you could all step up your game somewhat then I can stop chiming in).
It's an imperfect solution to be sure. But in these situations (officially ending support for WinXP/IE6, ending support for some plugin, etc) there is no perfect one. There needs to be some motivation to get users and websites to move on from Flash but there's also consideration for breaking commonly used services.
Aside from YouTube, I don't see any other Google properties in the list.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/...
My point is that they are building html5 versions of many of their sites (like Youtube, probably the biggest site supporting html5). Why would they care about serving the old flash versions of those sites to their html5 browser?
I agree that they have not moved all of their properties in lockstep over to html5. But I think Youtube supporting html5 provides more information about their motivations than the number of domains they are putting on the default whitelist.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
As others have mentioned, Google finance is as well as well as other finance sites. Makes you wonder how someone haven't introduced any HTML5 graphs for stats yet...
Anyway, on one side you have youtube advertising and adblockers, on the other side they want to force people to stay online and not use the content offline, but they can't have all of them not block ads.
I really wonder about the real cost of hosting youtube videos, and the money they make from ads on youtube. I think there is a huge loss there. Youtube RED might solve this.
Edit
Also the propaganda [1] against it makes me laugh. The reason Google wants it out is probably because it can't track the ads inside Flash apps.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3160644/Googl...
"Leaked documents have revealed the program has a serious vulnerability that lets hackers take over anyone's computer."
Later this year we plan to change how Chromium hints to websites about the presence of Flash Player, by changing the default response of Navigator.plugins and Navigator.mimeTypes. If a site offers an HTML5 experience, this change will make that the primary experience. We will continue to ship Flash Player with Chrome, and if a site truly requires Flash, a prompt will appear at the top of the page when the user first visits that site, giving them the option of allowing it to run for that site (see the proposal[2] for the mock-ups). [1]
1. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/ch...
2. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/106_KLNJfwb9L-1hVVa4i...
This was on Firefox by the way.
The final plugin? What about widevine?