It May Be A While For WebM In Adobe's Flash

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It May Be A While For WebM In Adobe's Flash

While Adobe previously said it would support Google's WebM video format within their Flash Player software, it doesn't look like this support will be arriving soon...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAwODA

[Reloaded211]

Google is moving to using HTMP5 player instead of Flash-based one on Youtube, so the lack of WebM support in Flash isn't that important. As soon as Youtube and porn sites have moved to HTML5, that'll be the end of Flash, for sure. Adobe is shooting themselves in foot with this.

[rrae]

Google is moving to using HTMP5 player instead of Flash-based one on Youtube, so the lack of WebM support in Flash isn't that important. As soon as Youtube and porn sites have moved to HTML5, that'll be the end of Flash, for sure. Adobe is shooting themselves in foot with this.

From the user perspective, this is true. But if you are the one, who currently must manage and store two different video codecs (+ different quality-variants each), it would have been a great help, if Adobe had integrated it in Flash. There are still users with Internet Explorer or Safari, with no Webm-playback out-of-the-box. Alas, MS and Apple are the ones to blame the most.

[d2kx]

It's fine, folks. Adobe is too busy making Flash perform even worse with every new release than to add new features that would actually be useful for content networks.

[Kano]

For rendering/decode accelleration you need now vdpau, not good for amd freaks - thats clear But missing webm support is nothing somebody would notice. You can try webm with yt, but only 720p, for full hd+ only h264 is possible, maybe somebody should ask google first why not 1080p/webm for yt.

[Ex-Cyber]

As soon as Youtube and porn sites have moved to HTML5, that'll be the end of Flash, for sure. Adobe is shooting themselves in foot with this.

I'm not sure that will really happen anytime soon. Major video sites have been "testing" HTML5 for over a year and are still falling back to Flash for pretty much anything with ads. Considering the existence of projects like AdBlock and NoScript, I'm not surprised that they're hesitant to expose ads to the DOM. There's also the issue of sites like Hulu, Crunchyroll, et. al. wanting DRM support.

Outside of video streaming, Flash is still the main way to do scripted audio playback. The HTML5 AUDIO element is a joke in its current form (though this is at least being worked on).

[smitty3268]

It was only going to encourage people to stop using Flash.

If Flash supports WebM, then it's a viable codec by itself, and websites could serve all their video in that format. That would just encourage websites to look at HTML5 video instead of going through flash.

By leaving support out, websites would have to create videos in both h.264 and WebM to make sure all browsers can view them, which is a much larger barrier to cross.

[Kano]

I think you can forget that i-devices will support webm, so you always need h264 if you want to support those.

[smitty3268]

I think you can forget that i-devices will support webm, so you always need h264 if you want to support those.

Yes, that's true. However, i don't think they make up a large enough percentage of web traffic to make much of a difference in the long run, and they'd eventually be forced to include support for what everyone else was using.

It wouldn't happen for a couple more years, though, and may never happen if Flash doesn't include it.

[AJenbo]

I'm not sure that will really happen anytime soon. Major video sites have been "testing" HTML5 for over a year and are still falling back to Flash for pretty much anything with ads. Considering the existence of projects like AdBlock and NoScript, I'm not surprised that they're hesitant to expose ads to the DOM. There's also the issue of sites like Hulu, Crunchyroll, et. al. wanting DRM support.

Outside of video streaming, Flash is still the main way to do scripted audio playback. The HTML5 AUDIO element is a joke in its current form (though this is at least being worked on).

adblock works fine with blocking video ads in most flash based players.