Adobe Releases a HTML5 Video Player (with Flash fallback) | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Releases a HTML5 Video Player (with Flash fallback)

blogs.adobe.com

60 pointsvital10127 comments

It's the Kaltura player:

http://www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5/

I'm not sure what part Adobe played - all of the code is Kaltura's, and the widget itself refers to their site. I think the "released" action is that they added it to their Widget Browser. Woot.

It's not clear, but the the Widget Browser is a separate AIR app - it's not built-in or part of Dreamweaver. Also, the video the author suggests to watch actually takes you to a teaser; you have to have an account to view it.

I think that Adobe is finally realizing that their value is in their tools, not in their platforms. Photoshop makes lots of money and doesn't have a platform aspect. The win-win strategy for both Adobe and the Web at large is to provide a killer Creative Suite that works seamlessly across devices.

Adobe doesn't have anything against HTML5 - they've been adding bits to Dreamweaver and other CS products over the past year. Like Flash, most of you don't use Dreamweaver nor Creative Suite so naturally you wouldn't know this.

I understand that a large (if not just loud) portion of HN doesn't like Flash nor develop for it. But as such, what you're saying is inherently an outsider's perspective and thus potentially inaccurate and unqualified.

Flash is different; it's not what you expect nor wish it to be. That's it. It serves a different purpose. For those that do use Flash, it does that purpose very well.

I'm going to assume that by "you", you mean "the collective you of Hacker News" and not me.

However, even with that assumption: I've worked with Flash before. I have nothing inherently against Flash, personally. In fact, I quite like Flash when it comes to its sweet spot of animation. I just view Flash as a means to an end; HTML5 is another means to a very similar end, so I don't see strategic value in Adobe owning their own means.

Adobe has opened up everything that they can for Flash Player. There are only a few closed portions, such as H.264 video license stuff, that they cannot share for obvious reasons.

Yes, "you" was a general y'all, not specifically you =)

Edit: Question just came up at session at MAX. Direct from Adobe Flash Product Manager: there is a lot of code that isn't Adobe's that they had to license. Also, Flash Player is tiny/tight bit of code ( < 1 MB). It's messy to be very efficient. Finally, they have opened it up, but Adobe still writes 99% of the code themselves, so they're not encouraged to open it up more.

Now if only they'd actually stabilize their products instead of adding new features that I couldn't care less about.

There's even a new bug with Photoshop CS5 where the spacebar shortcut stops working if Firefox is open. How does that even happen?! Or how about Photoshop crashing when attempting to quit.

Doesn't Photoshop have a huge ecosystem of plug-ins and brushes and stuff. Seems kind of platform-y to me.

Adobe (and Macromedia before them) has always realized this, it is the talking heads who like to analyze the latest Apple vs Adobe spat that are "finally realizing" this.

So this widget requires Dreamweaver or some Adobe Air thingy. Unless you're a non-HTML person that's already using Dreamweaver (maybe at a college or something), this seems a lot less attractive than video-js or any of the other available HTML5 libraries.

My main concern with Adobe is that it seemed to me that they where more concerned (though rightfully so... they are a for profit company after all) with milking every last dollar out of Flash evangelizing it's used everywhere. They seem to have listened to the pleas of web designers everywhere now to embrace the new open standards, and that's great in my book. Now we need to get rid of Adobe Air, and leave Flash as a tool for animation as it was purputed in the past.

I'm not sure of Adobe's intentions but it's(from our perspective) in their best interest to focus on not fighting web trends and create the tools to facilitate them instead. Flash has evolved, but it's far from being open enough for the internet to enable it further. The future? It seems to me the beast will return from whence it came, specific and isolated, "flash!"

If I was Adobe I'll say the opposite. That it falls back to HTML5.

Sounds like they are accepting that Flash is on its way out.

Why shouldn't they? They don't sell Flash player, they sell Adobe Flash described as "Create web designs and online experiences complete with interactive content, exceptional typography, high-quality video, and smooth animation for truly engaging web experiences," not "Create .swf files".

So, while faster HTML5 adoption would give them less time to adapt (therefore, they say that HTML5 is "not ready" -- honestly, true: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/c...), they need to adapt and show that they're adapting -- because otherwise the creatives that are currently using Flash could start considering options (currently few, but that too can change).

Something like "well, by the time iPad is too popular for flash-based websites to be viable, we will allow you to make HTML5, so stop worrying about that".

The more i think about it, the more clever the idea of flash using HTML5 as a backend sounds from adobe's perspective. In the (very) long term, it would remove a big maintenance responsability from them, and put part of this weight on the browser's engine shoulders.

They wouldn't have to bear with the vocal linux and mac crowds saying their player sucks, for once, and their stuff would play on other platforms too.

I think Adobe realizes this. The problem is that Javascript performance/graphic performance isn't there yet.

> Sounds like they are accepting that Flash is on its way out.

Adobe will leverage Flash for all it's worth, but they cannot escape the reality of the market.

Mobile is exploding, and Flash has virtually no presence on mobile (and that's Adobe's fault, not Apple's). HTML5, via WebKit, has a huge presence on mobile. Adobe sells development tools, so it should be obvious where they need to go.

Wait, you have to run an Air app in order to download an HTML5 widget?

As it should be done - amen!

I can't help but wonder if there's a catch. Has anyone had a chance to look at the code? Any bad surprises?

Adobe willfully open sourced the ActionScript engine that runs its flash player, and donated it to the Mozilla foundation, under MIT license. If you run Firefox, you have been running Adobe code for a few years now. Did you see a catch? where you ever prompted to buy Acrobat Writer or an Omniture subscription? Don't think so :-)

It's really time developers added Adobe to their "friends" list, imo.

> It's really time developers added Adobe to their "friends" list, imo.

I'm not a developer. As a user, I'll add Adobe to my "friends" list as soon as they have a decent implementation of Flash for OS X that doesn't take tons of memory and CPU cycles.

Flash is the only thing that can make me restart Chrome because it becomes a resource hog...

The research on this has been done, a few years ago, by professors in Ireland and Austria. Adobe is one VM upgrade away from being on-par with Android/Dalvik, SquirrelFish and LuaJit, in terms of performance.

Adobe already has the technology to improve performance under their noses, but I don't know what is taking them so long. But I can tell you this: once they implement the already published fixes, you can expect at least 60% performance improvement in Flash player, by my calculations ..

-- edit, removed irrelevant facts.

In chrome hit shift+esc, find the flash plugin process and hit "end process", it'll restart itself automatically as necessary (you may have to refresh pages hosting flash elements).

> It's really time developers added Adobe to their "friends" list, imo.

Maybe after they fire some of their bloggers for continually stirring up the pot and stop adding to PDF in a that puts everyone else at a disadvantage. Open standards kinda need to be open in the changing.

So, elephant in the room, did Apple cause this?

Adobe has always been committed to open standards.

I am not affiliated, not paid by them, and don't know anybody there; so I am fit to say this. Adobe is a force of good and very much committed to openness.

Anyone who runs Firefox and bashes Adobe is just being a troll, if not a vile hypocrite. They're doing their part; sometimes they're slow to act, because they're a dumb tool vendor at heart, but when they get around to it, they tend to do good things.

No one should take the credit for Adobe's openness other than Adobe itself.

Could you provide some more context to your statements? What does Firefox have to do with Adobe?

Adobe gave their ActionScript engine away to Mozilla foundation under MIT license. Though it's no longer used, except for NanoJit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28JavaScript_engine%29

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