Adobe Flash Player is really bad. Steve Jobs was hopefully right
announcing the death of Flash prematurely.
I've got the modified PPC Flash plugin which is actually the final
version of PPC Flash 10.1.102.64 but is modified to identify itself as
11.1.102.55 which fools many sites such as Facebook into playing Flash
video.
When a site won't play Flash with my modified version, I switch the
Safari User Agent in the Develop menu to say "iPad" and then sites
like the BBC will send a iOS compatible HTML5 stream.
Today I was attempting to watch live stream of the Amgen Tour of
California and they are in cahoots with NBC Sports which has streamed
several Olympics in non-PPC Mac compatible MS Silverlight, and now has
changed to Flash BUT there is no support for PPC Macs and the Flash
stream will not play in Safari. To make matters worse, they only
stream to iOS devices that install a special iOS App from the Apple
AppStore, so changing the User Agent to iPad has no effect.
I was forced to boot up an old Intel Mac with 10.5.8 to attempt to
view this flash video. Again, my Flash Player was identified by NBC
Sports/Amgen TOC as "too old" and I needed an update. The identified
version was 10.3.183.19. When I downloaded the latest version
11.2.202.235 the Adobe installer says "this version requires 10.6" and
will not install. This is where things got interesting. I launched
Google Chrome browser because I remembered that Chrome bundles the
current Flash Player inside the browser. To my amazement the version
of Flash in Chrome was the current 11.2.202.235 and the NBC Sports/
Amgen TOC Live Stream played fine within Chrome.
This means that Google is supporting Flash for 10.5 while both Apple &
Adobe have given up. When you go to Adobe's Flash Download site the
final version for 10.5 offered is 10.3.183.19 which is what I already
had that wouldn't play correctly.
As an experiment, I opened Google
Chrome.app>Contents>Versions>~version#>Google Chrome
Framework>Internet Plug-Ins>Flash Player Plugin for Google Chrome. I
renamed "Flash Player Plugin for Chrome.plugin" to "Flash
Player.plugin" and placed this into my Library>Internet Plug-Ins
folder and corrected the Ownership & Permissions to System:Admin. This
did NOT work, the player was correctly identified and the plugin
loaded in both Safari & Firefox, BUT the video was full of glitches
and nonsense, whereas it was smooth and even in Chrome.
I also transferred the real 11.2.202.235 plugin for Safari from a
10.6.8 installation over to the 10.5.8 system and again, same exact
problem, it was identified but the video was glitchy. This means that
for Intel Macs with 10.5.8 Google Chrome is the ONLY way to have a
current supported version of Adobe Flash Player that actually works.
This is amazing that Google is supporting someone else's software and
someone else's hardware BETTER than either Adobe or Apple!
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