Friday, June 29, 2012

Flash to be no longer supported in Android 4.1

Flash to be no longer supported in Android 4.1

Followed a bit of a thread in comments on this topic in Google + sort of laughing.  Someone mentions html5 being 10 years out of date...um...you better check your facts there...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_player#Criticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML5_and_Flash
Some things to consider recent release of Flash, basically up until somewhat recent Flash had adopted the h.264 format which is the highly patent ridden version of a similar container format such as html5, but apparently people still have up until recently complained about flash for things like high computational processing problems (owing to the lack of gpu computational handling).


Really while complaints have gone out about android for lacking adequate coding in computational handling say with dual core, one wonders if generally in the pc computings market this were a drop in the bucket relative to all the problems that Windows and flash and other peripherals have offered at times to the overall consumer market?


Interestingly enough, the html5 format is not so difficult in terms of encoding.  The alternative to Openshot in Ubuntu and I believe Openshot both offer html5 encoding options for video rendering.  The problem with respect to getting a user community to embrace html5 may come by way of  video rendering software packages including this rendering option, and then Youtube servers I could imagine might provide automatic rendering services on their end, regardless of the received container format for the uploaded video?  If this were the case, it seems large scale deployments of html5 through mainstream sites could easily be incorporated into a given deployment infrastructure.  Literally the degree of popularity in a particular container format, need not be contingent on a given user base handling the bulk of the conversion processing here.

With and web browser/applications support,
and server support, html5 should be generally readily accessible to the general population if not already soon in the future.  What browsers may not support this...hmm...not sure if it were true at present since I haven't used the latest version of Internet Explorer for windows XP, but it seems supposedly html5(webm) weren't available for this browser, but owing to the decline in XP usage, not to mention whatever existing user population still using Internet Explorer, the other big mainstream alternatives, Firefox and Chrome generally offer this format, I believe even on Windows XP.  
The other thing to consider here also, is that even Flash isn't the same Flash of several years ago.  h.264 Flash enabled format video can run several megabytes of space relative to older Flash formats running at some 30 to forty megabytes of video (similarly html5/webm offers the same sorts of memory savings here).  This conversion deployment to h.264 was done literally overnight, and browser and server supports were probably given to similar rapid deployments.  The same could be said for html5 if furthered support is provided.  At the moment Youtube I believe is currently test trial offering this format enabled support option http://www.youtube.com/html5.  Been this way I believe for past several months.

Basically popularity of html5/webm in my opinion is probably contingent on major video traffic sites like Youtube and Vimeo offering this format option commonplace alongside other options, this would be irrespective of a given user communities actual handling of video client side (provided options exist here as is already the case in many up to date popular web browser choices).  Hard to know how html5/webm might effect other types of client based web applications here and whether or not this really could be problematic with respect to a given overall user community, but then more commonly I think its a misconception to assume a case of 'either/or' in terms of technologies deployment of this type.  It seems high traffic video hosting servers have more incentive here to keep container formats up to date not just for the sake of their clients but also for the simple fact that memory savings translates into less allocated space needed for server end storage, and fractions less of used space should already be enough incentive with respect to making viable any up to date container format which webm/html5 provides...technically Flash offers this similarly, but the differences considered here, were patents and the proprietary nature of one container format over the other.  In summation really the powerhouse in the revolution to html5/webm may well be initiatives taken by Youtube and Vimeo, and the user community would know very little differences here as a major web application, namely their browsers, would be likely conformed to this container format (deployment of this kind happened months ago with some published fanfare...at least on the Firefox side).

No comments:

Post a Comment

Oblivion

 Between the fascination of an upcoming pandemic ridden college football season, Taylor Swift, and Kim Kardashian, wildfires, crazier weathe...