Flash on Android is shockingly bad | Hacker News Reader

Flash on Android is shockingly bad

newteevee.com

35 pointsmaxharris36 comments

I've had no problems watching on-demand video content from my local TV station on my Nexus One: http://www.tvnz.co.nz/video

I would say the devil is in the implementations not the flash player....

Are you sure it is not using HTML5? tvnz have all their stuff in html5 as well, to work on the iPhone and iPad. They are actually very trend setting in this area.

If it really is fine, why don't you make a video and post it? Unless someone does this, the video above trumps text that claims otherwise.

Since the video review requires flash to view it, I decided to fire up my nexus one to watch it. The video started at 10 fps and jumped to ~25 after 5 seconds of decoding. This seems completely contrary to what the author is claiming.

I've watched quite a lot of videos around the web without any particular problem. I suspect the ones he is trying are all very high quality streams, or using an encoding that Android doesn't support well.

I regularly watch iView (http://www.abc.net.au/iview/) here in Australia and Flash playback is flawless on the Nexus One across the board. I'm really glad I have it even if there are situations where it doesn't work well.

there are a large number of sites that also demo html5 sucking just as bad. video=FUDcrap. 230+ points for this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646430 really? ...when it sent smoke rings out my dual core with 4GB of RAM? i most certainly don't work for adobe, but crap like this is what made me stop reading slashdot. btw: i like arcade fire a lot.

Well all things being equal, wouldn't it be better for the open-source solution to win out in the end?

html 5 is not a replacement for flash, not even close.

HTML5 doesn’t need to have all capabilities of Flash. The Flash plugin might very well be relegated to Java plugin status (i.e. hardly ever used) while still being a lot more capable than HTML5.

All HTML5 has to capture are the most common use cases Flash is currently used for. Video? Sure deal. Audio? Looks like it will work. Animations? No problem. Infographics with light interactivity (like the stuff you find on nytimes.com)? Will work. Games? Hm, not so great. Audio and video capture? Let’s not talk about that. Oh, and restaurant websites? Shouldn’t have used Flash in the first place.

What’s important is what’s widely used, not what something is theoretically capable of. You are right that HTML5 is far from being able to match all the features of Flash. It doesn’t have to.

... and the platform won't survive long-term on free games and audio/video capture alone.

Video has been a relatively recent use for Flash, where it pushed out QuickTime (which Steve stills stews over), MediaPlayer, Real Media Player, and others. It's always been an odd purpose for it, given that it's an ultra thin wrapper around a standard stream, so extracting that stream seems to be an obvious choice. Many "flash videos" are simply a h264 video consumed by an SWF, so decoupling that seems like a big advantage.

A cup of noddles is no replacement for a four course dinner.

If HTML5 can do most of the important stuff that flash does, then fine. It already comes with a better supported programming language (javascript), with 1000s of libraries to supports it. It doesn't need to do everything.

And when Adobe releases support for exporting to HTML5 from flash, as they have been rumored to be doing, it will be looking like the end.

And how long as Flash been in development and had time to mature? You can't compare something that is at version 10 with something brand new.

Articles that equate Flash with Flash Video are shockingly bad.

This point needs to be emphasized more. All these articles just deal with video and then come to the conclusion that HTML5 is better than Flash because the video playback is smoother. What no one seems to mention is the much more complex applications that are built in Flash.

There is basically no existing tooling to build complex things in HTML5. A designer I know is working on a massive graphical timeline. It has tons of different layers and all sorts of user interaction points. It's a pretty big undertaking with the tooling that Adobe provides for working with Flash. It would take an order of magnitude more effort to do the same project with HTML5 and there would probably need to be someone involved with significant programming knowledge.

Someday maybe the tooling will exist but at the moment HTML5 just isn't a reasonable replacement for everything that Flash can do.

Did I miss the part where they said HTML5 was better? I took it to be more of a slam of the Android fanboys who insist that Android is better than iOS because look! we have Flash and you don't! Reality is, video just plain sucks on mobile, period and until the various lunatics quit pimping which platform is cooler and actually work on fixing it, it's all going to suck.

90% of my day-to-day flash usage is for video except for my fantasy football draft today at espn which kept crashing every 10 minutes because i was using flash on linux

Flash on my N1 hasn't quite lived up to my expectations, but my experience has been better than the reviewer's. I have flash set to 'on demand' to avoid all of the superfluous flash banner/video content fed from ad CDNs. Use firebug or resource tracker on abc.go.com or fox.com to get an idea of how many swfs and javascript files are loaded and queued and you'll understand why performance will be sub par whether playing video via flash or <video>.

That said, in testing mp4s on my site, the same video (480x360 or 640x360 h.264 baseline) served with <video> seems to play with less stuttering and better scaling than when using a flash wrapper.

I just wish I could play more orisinal games on the N1. The games run well, but drag mouse events seem limited to a second or two.

It's interesting how differently we sometimes treat "release early, release often" depending on how big the company is that's doing it. With headlines like these on the front page, I can see why so many people feel like they need their product to be absolutely perfect before they release it.

I for one have been enjoying flash on my droid, but I guess my expectations weren't set nearly high enough.

I don't understand why there's such a polarization regarding Flash vs. HTML5. A well-designed platform should take advantage of the technology that applies best for its intended market -- whether it's using a single technology or multiple technologies working harmoniously together.

As an example, we're working on CRM/Help Desk/CMS platform that uses a Flex/Air management interface in combination with mobile app versions and an HTML5-based customer frontend -- a decision we've made due to the complexities of the project and our intended market.

s/shockingly/predictably/

There is a lot more involved in "horsepower" than clock rate. Taking a power-optimized processor and running a program that is notoriously resource hungry (i.e. written very inefficiently) will result in a poor "user experience." Predictably.

Don't put blame on Flash, when trying to decode 720p/1080p video on Snapdragon. This CPU simply doesn't have the power to do that, no matter what the clock rate is.

For what it's worth, I've had a similar experience on my Motorola Droid.

The worst part about having Flash, though, is all the Flash advertising that I now see.

Why don't you just turn it off and have it run only on request?

Ah, didn't know that setting existed, much better now :)

in the settings I thought you could make it only load flash items when you select them?

I've been surprised how often Flash has come in handy on my Evo. From the WordPress Audio player, to random FunnyOrDie videos, to NYTimes infographics, even for watching embedded YouTube without having to leave the context of a web page.

It's not perfect but it seems to work pretty well 9/10 times. It is very useful and nice to have, no matter how much the diehard Apple fanboys want to believe otherwise.

I would like it on my iPhone and iPad but I can live without it for the most part. I like the fact that a lot of video sites are doing the html5 video route and the iPhone and iPad popularity is pushing that adoption. funny or die works fine on my iPad. There are the ocasional restaurant websites and some other sites that don't work correctly without flash but they are a small minority of the sites that I visit.

The killer feature is having it on demand, if you weren't able to turn it of I would have uninstalled it long ago.

The daily show video works quite well. Can't watch that for free on any apple product, so I'll stick with flash

Yes Adobe should just abandon the technology that pioneered many of the things in HTML5 because everything's invented now!

I didn't rtfa because it looks like flamewar linkbait, but to me anything would be better than a blank rectangle.

Not shocked : )

Here's a video response.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU

It doesn't at all dismiss the observations made by newteevee, but I'm just trying to bring some balance in for people who might be considering a device and contemplating how much Flash really matters: A lot of these sites are picking the absolute worst cases and parading them as the standard, when they're anything but.

HTC Desire here. I watched the flash video in the newteevee site, and it played well. But when I wanted to pause it I found I couldn't, as the UI relies on mouse hover! I have flash disabled on my phone as it kills webpage performance.

Shockingly for flash fan-boys or for guys who can understand at least the basics of a system's engineering? ^_^

Reply on news.ycombinator.com