For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6.
The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM.
But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer.
It's much better than having plugins that do the same thing (if you use firefox you're used to Flash asking for trial Norton to be installed every time a security exploit is found in Flash). In the perfect world we wouldn't need it, but it leaves no excuse for media companies not to use HTML5.
EME is a spec for a communication channel between script in a web page and a browser, with the idea that the browser then talks to a DRM module. It's not a spec for a communication channel between the browser and a DRM module.
This is important, because it means that you end up with DRM modules that are tied to a particular browser.
The NPAPI plugin situation is unfortunate in all sorts of ways, but the one good thing it had going for it was that there _was_ an API that multiple browsers all implemented, such that a single plugin binary woudl work in all of them (modulo the usual bugs and incompatibilities you have when there are multiple implementors of an API).
Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 main browser vendors also happen to be DRM vendors, and were rather united in their opposition to the W3C creating a specification for the communication channel between the browser and the DRM module.
For instance: If someone do research for educational or critical purposes, they have the right to use copyrighted material under "Fair Use" (US, UK and other countries have similar rules).
With DRM this would essentially block this right (if used on the material in question), which of course is not a good thing.
But it's great to see that HTML5 is now the preferred choice on YT.
Unless you want the web page to work. One could just as well describe having a web browser as "completely optional".
Or will it most likely be a specification that allows multiple (but NDA'd) implementations, such as the DRM component of dvd and bluray players? If that is the case, then it is still better than what we had before, as multiple vendors will need to compete (increasing the likelihood of a non-crappy implementation).
Although I can see sites being reluctant to do that because it would be inconvenient for the users to have to install something specifically to watch the web videos on that site. One thing I can see happening would be one major DRM software that emerges and all websites that want DRM work together to use that.
It was positively mind blowing.
Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.
Luckily there was an alternative, Real Alternative, that enabled you to play the content without having to install that ghastly RealPlayer. It seems like the community always finds a way around crappy software.
It handles more formats than iTunes (FLAC and OGG, maybe others), and the interface is okay, but not as polished as iTunes.
I haven't used it to add or remove music from my iPhone on either platform, but the Linux version can play music from the phone, so maybe it works.
For a real spit-take, though, put one of the companies that we think of today as Very Big Deals next to it for comparison. Like, say, comparing Apple's performance to RealNetworks' over the decade from 1997 to 2007:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
(I omit the last few years because AAPL has gone up so much over that period that if you include it you can't see the line for RealNetworks anymore. But check out how long it took Apple just to reach the heights Real was at in the late '90s.)
Or Adobe, all the way up to now:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
"For the ubercool interactive charts, you need to install the Adobe Flash Player"
Just seemed a bit ironic, given the topic.
What killed them was the iPod. Or rather, computers and bandwidth improved so better quality compression could be used. Then RealPlayer limped along on name recognition alone. Although during the early days of h.264 it was the easiest way to play an MP4 on Windows.
I had been using ClickToPlugin under Safari to force HTML5 videos on sites (and mainly for a way to send YouTube videos to the AppleTV via AirPlay, as there was no other way to do it) but now all machines are Flash-free.
I think I'll have a coffee to celebrate.
Basically it's as much HTML5 as <object data="swf"> was HTML4.
It's supported only by DRM vendors: Google (WideVine), Safari (FairPlay) and Microsoft (PlayReady) and doesn't work in open-source browsers (not even in Chromium or custom WebKit builds).
There are a fair number of people who can't skip Flash quite yet for Netflix.
Good start though.
"Here, if we give you 10 million USD for free, can you just get your devs to use this untested pile of DRM?"
Really.
So my old tactic of open 5 tabs, maximise and watch one by one is completely nerfed
To prevent YouTube from switching sources when resizing the content, select a specific quality first (it defaults to “Auto”). I wouldn't be surprised if there were browser extensions that automatically do this (e.g. always choose the highest quality).
Of course computer itself plays 1080p h264 perfectly fine in mplayer, so I might end up writing javascript that fires mplayer with mp4 link (to stream rather than downloading whole clip) instead of displaying video in the browser :(
There used to be mplayer plugin for firefox a loong time ago, nowadays all browsers use building unoptimized codecs.
The fact that somebody down-voted me for adding a relevant anecdote, but happens to go against the tide of this threads opinion(ie: FU Flash), it's pretty indicative of the extremely poor voting etiquette around here.
I'm hoping it's a local max/temporary decline for Chrome, but Firefox now feels like the lighter of the two browsers in my use.
With Mozilla, all discussions are open, choices are justified, and literally anyone (assuming your reasoning and technical abilities are sound) can contribute.
(I'll note that I don't actively contribute much to Mozilla, but if nobody uses Firefox then it's not going to keep getting better).
Occasionally there are already Chrome-only websites, there is a Chrome web store that could potentially become a gatekeeper for software similar to what Apple is doing in the iOS ecosystem.
I'm using Firefox even if that means that I don't get some cutting edge feature that I don't really need until a few weeks later. Hope that makes sense.
1) PDF viewer. 2) Flash. 3) Some audio/video codec support (e.g. Chromium has no support for MP3, AAC, H.264, or the MP4 container format; see <http://www.chromium.org/audio-video>). 4) Crash reporting, metrics, that sort of thing.
#1 and #2 are certainly closed-source. I can't speak to #3. [EDIT: as surrealize points out, #1 is no longer closed-source.]
From an end-user perspective, there's a significant difference between "browser that will play the music and the videos and show me the PDFs" and "browser that will not do those things". Chromium, while open source, is really not a viable end-user browser on today's internet.
Chromium is fine, and I use it next to FF all day every day. I have never tried committing to it so I have no idea, but the general mindshare seems to be Chromium contributions are Google dominated.
Regardless, yeah Flash on Firefox on Linux is several years behind.
I'm not sure if switching to CPU-only video decode will be a net gain for most.
There are a lot of people in places like that.
Also, Allwinner, Intel, Mediatek, and Rockchip all have SoCs announced with hardware VP9 decode: http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs (not sure how many of those are already shipping).
Apparently the stats on user engagement show improvement. It seems that initially they showed a lot of improvement, but then they realised they were comparing the average video against only the most popular videos in VP9 (since those made the most sense to transcode first) and obviously people are more likely to keep watching something really popular.
Once they took that into account they did identify that some older machines would have a degraded performance and therefore lower engagement with VP9, but the heuristic for avoiding them is "Running XP" so it seems that most modern machines have a better experience with CPU decoding of VP9.
I believe they were up to 60% of all desktop views in VP9 by the end of last summer, so I'd guess if it was going to melt anyones's computer it would have happened by now.
I also recently discovered that the Crocodile Hunter at 1/2 speed is freaking hilarious. e.g.,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLIMgXv89VU&feature=youtu.be...
document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = 1.35Actually, come to think of it, both are good ideas.
That reason was reversed, and Adobe Air (including what was essentially compiled Flash) became available on iOS.
(see daring fireball for more information: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...)
Remember, this is the guy that controlled QuickTime and never opened it up. That was a bit of problem for open video supporters.
(from your link)
Apple did in fact control Quicktime AND keep it very proprietary.
To insinuate that they were pro open source on video is revisionism.
Also, the events described in your link all took place while Jobs was not at Apple.
My point was the Steve Jobs complaining about proprietary video is very ironic ... when he was pedaling his own proprietary video tech.
"proprietary acceleration techniques"
http://web.archive.org/web/20010605082836/www.pa.msu.edu/~ha...
Steve Jobs was not at Apple between 1985 and 1997.
<i>More than 250 million copies of QuickTime 6 have been downloaded in > less than two years since its release. According to Frost & Sullivans > 2004 Global Media Streaming Platform Report, between 2002 and 2003 > Microsofts and Real Networks worldwide market share percentages were > either stable or declining while QuickTimes market share increased to > 36.8 percent, a close second to Microsoft. Real Networks came in third > place with less than 25 percent of the worldwide streaming market > share.</i>
Apple was never an "open source/open technology" white knight in video.
Are there any examples of flash only video? I used to use a 3rd party extension that would show videos in html5 and i never came accross any video that required me to load it in flash. I'm curious how Youtube tries to deliver those videos now.
Is there a way around this? Do you think Youtube would be for or against that (i.e. do they really want me opening more than one tab?)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12A4345d Safari/600.1.4I know this only for research purposes of course...
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/flash_takes_a_blow_as...
Unless you hypothise that porn users not having flash installed is somehow a larger percentage compared to average web user not having flash installed?!
The idea is youtube loses maybe 20 cents or something for losing a user. A porn site loses $30/month or something.
The only thing that seems to occasionally hang for a second or two is loading a pre-roll ad, but that's pretty reasonable given the additional processes around ad serving. On that note, pretty awesome that those are also HTML5...must be nice to be YouTube and control your own ad format.
Edit: For clarification, not saying I enjoy ads, but having dealt with the bizarre SWF formats that ad vendors pass along...
I think the problems started when they changed to the "adaptive" rate stuff; the players don't don't download the entire video file anymore, and instead they buffer in segments. Not only does this remove the ability to pre-buffer the entire video, the client seems to get out of sync with the server. The client ends up waiting forever, but the server isn't sending anything.
Fortunately, I was able to switch many of my friends over to youtbe-dl, and that fixed everything. Unfortunately, the article mentions the idiotic "encrypted medfia extensions" a one of the reasons for the changes to youtube; I wonder what additional useless hoops youtube-dl will end up having to have to jump through.
With HTML5 (under firefox nightly) sometimes it's really stuck and no acceptable amount of seek and/or wait had any effect on it, so I believe it's another kind of bug.
Then I think I'm done with that extension.
[1] There's an initiative to play HLS videos without flash at https://github.com/RReverser/mpegts, but its too much heavy since the browser needs to change mpegts container to mp4.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...
See:
[1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsa1...
Also, the HTML5 player has a nice feature to change the rate at which the video plays, which makes watching long talks a lot easier.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...
ClickToPlugin is great IMO and it's kept me from switching away from safari for the longest time.
Every day the number of reasons to keep Flash installed gets lower and lower. I still keep it installed on my machine for the occasional site that still uses it, but Flash's days are definitely numbered. When a site as big as Youtube stops using it, that is when you know there isn't long left. Fortunately Adobe realised HTML5 is the future a while ago and have been creating some great tools.
Let's you do marks and loops as well as using the playback controls.
As a test, I just popped open the first interesting looking video on my signed-in YouTube front page (my account has been set to HTML5 for a while).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRI3Ew4BvA
I'm not a fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but the video does have Lily Cole is in 1080p. Opera 27.0.1689.54 on Win 8.1 x64.
TL;DR: For now you need to use beta/aurora/nightly releases of firefox to enable 1080p/4K youtube with the HTML5 player.
Has any streaming platform actually rolled out an implementation of this? And has anyone found a way to break it?
Note EME isn't "DRM" per-se. Its an interface to enable custom DRM implementations. There's not "one thing" to break. I'd assume Youtube would use Widevine (another google company) which supports EME.
Man this line is hilarious. Your DRM to block users from keeping the videos you are sending them is not making the experience faster or smoother. Don't try to pass off user-hostile proprietary blobs restricting the data on their computer as anything but a terrible blow to a free and open Internet.
You can say, "yay drm", but say "yay drm", not "yay drm, bullshit about faster and smoother". At least own up to the fact you are crippling UX for personal gain.
~$ cat .asoundrc
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
Regardless, this is absolutely great. I haven't had flash for a while now and so it makes me happy to feel that HTML5 really is a valid replacement for most things.
Moving from flash to HTML5 adaptive bitrate is not trivial task and if you are familiar with MSE/EME, it shows how powerful the browser has become in delivering rich video content, either pre-recorded or live streaming.
With this, it seems to me there is a big gap now for encoding to new adaptive codecs, like MPEG-DASH and tooling to make something like livestreaming easy to do without flash.
Do you know by the way, is MPEG-DASH patent encumbered or not?
A whitelist + click for sound would be pretty much exactly what I want.
I think I actually prefer a working, portable Flash-based solution to that.
In not sure which are worst: Netflix and Google for pushing this bullshit into the browser & standard or uneducated users for swallowing it whole.
Some notable issues I've run into:
- play.spotify.com, I used to use the web player on my computer, it requires flash sadly. I've started using their OS X app.
- twitch.tv if I occasionally watch a stream, also needs flash. I tend to turn it on for the duration.
It's pretty great and I'm enjoying better battery life, more efficient use of cpu.
Also Google Maps seriously lags on Safari. Do not like it.
http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...
http://fr.slideshare.net/touradj_ebrahimi/spie2014-hev-cvsvp...
edit: facts will get you downvoted on HN. Nice.