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Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

I think Apple's hoping that video will start being done through HTML5 - or at least that sites will offer HTML5 video via H.264 as an option. For many sites pushing Flash video already in H.264 (as my organization is), this would require minimal changes.

This would be great for me as Flash usually uses around 90%+ of one core on my box to decode video while other media players (QuickTime, VLC) use a third of that. This is going to be hard for a lot of handhelds and hopefully that will lead HTML5 video to offer a much better experience on mobile devices.

Adobe knows that if they don't get Flash out for mobile platforms, Flash is going to be left out of the next push on the web in favor of Ajax and HTML5. So, while Adobe does dominate a lot of things right now, their position is tenuous.

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> Flash usually uses around 90%+ of one core on my box to decode video

Is that on a linux box?

My MacBook's core temperature goes up 80ºC (~176ºF) when playing Flash video (Vimeo, Youtube...). This doesn't happen with HTML5 embedded videos, or just standard H.264 or XViD videos.

Most likely QT is doing hardware decoding of the HTML5 /h.264 embedded videos while Flash video is being software decoded using the on2 codec on the main CPU.

My Mac does not do hardware video decoding. I can run 8 (!) 720p h264 videos in QuickTime at the same time with less than half cpu usage. I can't run a single one in Flash at full speed.

Flash just sucks terribly, that's all.

My Core 2 Duo (2.2 GHz) laptop on Vista does the same with an extra: increased fan speed and thus increased noise. Waiting for the holiday season to get new one on cheap (I hope) and I am hoping someone at Adobe can't sleep at nights over this!

http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

This lets you play Youtube videos via Mac OS X's built in decoders in Safari. Plus it's a general Flash-bocker. I love it.

Anywhere but Windows. Flash is especially pathetic on OS X (and mdasen referred to QuickTime).

Windows flash sucks too. Hulu at 1920x1080 on my Tv uses 100% of one core to play back video that windows media player can do with 5 to 10 percent utilization on a single core.

Actually yeah. I cannot watch Hulu videos in fullscreen on Windows, but I can on my Mac. This is a dual-boot setup btw, so identical hardware...

I can have 3/4 flash-apps running (like facebook games, etc) with no appreciable effect on my 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400, which doesn't have an ATI/nVidia chipset. I upgraded the ram, but only to 1 & 1/4 gig (maximum is 2 gig) from 512 meg. It's a core 2, 1.66 ghz, totalling ~3.3 ghz.

I'm unsure how anyone's system can be hitting 90% on one of their cores if my 3 year old machine barely hits 10% of a core when viewing solely a HD youtube video. Chrome (including Flash) was hitting about 50% earlier with two facebook games loaded up and a HD youtube video running.

Flash is unseemly solely because it doesn't multithread, that's the only support that needs urgently implementing. H.264 through HTML5 is a pipe dream and likely to be unaccepted for a long period of time, content providers like Youtube and Hulu aren't going to allow or be allowed to provide their video in H.264 as it's simply far too easy to download.

Windows flash seems to have better performance than linux or mac. I have dual boot older Dell and the difference between Windows and Linux is significant. Same holds for my triple boot netbook: linux and mac are much slower than windows.

You can already rewrite Youtube pages to play the exact same video via HTML5. I linked to the plugin you need elsewhere in this thread.

So Youtube in flash is already "far too easy to download" and Flash's "encrypted" streaming mode has been broken too, though it turned out not to be that protected anyway.

Isn't YouTube already available in H.264 for at least a year or two?

H.264 through HTML5 is a pipe dream and likely to be unaccepted for a long period of time

It is already supported in every browser except Internet Explorer.

content providers like Youtube and Hulu aren't going to allow or be allowed to provide their video in H.264

YouTube already provides their video in H.264. The Flash player is just a way of decoding what is otherwise a regular H.264 video file, which is exactly as easy to download as any other.

I think Adobe is still relying on the fact that presenting videos in Flash players still prevents the casual user from simply downloading the video. This is something media corporations still care about, and conceivably will keep caring about until there is a radical shift in their business models. Maybe I don't understand the H.264 standard well enough, but I don't see why HTML 5 engines won't just provide a "Save media as..." option in the context menu just like they do now for images. Unless HTML 5 provides a way to at least partially control the distribution of videos, I think Big Media will opt to stay with Flash.

Why doesn't Apple just implement something like ClickToFlash in mobile Safari? In other words, why doesn't Apple just provide the video experience while leaving Flash out of mobile Safari? (Without leaving Safari and going to another app.)

EDIT: I think I know why: poor Flash performance combined with the superior mobile user experience of a specialist app!

surely there is more to flash than video. all those stupid sites with navigation headers, or worse, complete splash/intro screens that you can't get past without clicking somewhere on the flash applet.

it's hard to navigate pretty much any car manufacturer's website these days without flash.

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