Cheers for the detailsed response, comments from me scattered below: --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, "Mike Meiser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 4/10/07, Steve Watkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The flash issues does seem silly but there is a logic behind its > > evolution. Flash originally put on mobiles to enable developers to > > make flash that specificaly targets the device, whether to provide > > games or net-enabled widgets, screensavers, etc. Not to provide > > desktop-level flash compatibility in the browser. > > hmm... sounds like AOL. :)
I dont see it that way, because here we are talking about flash as a language/development platform/runtime, rather than as a website. Right now if I want to develop apps that run on the N95, then so far as Ive learnt so far I could use C, Java ME, python or Flash Lite. So I believe that previous versions of flash lite have basically been competing in this space. > Indeed full browser support on mobile devices is probably the biggest > issue facing the mobile web... as long as it stays "like the web but > not really the web" it will never really catch on mainstream, it's to > much of an effort for everyone. There will always be some purpose > specific winners... but I'm betting it's mainstream catching on will > be a factor of band... 3g and wimax. Yes, I think this has been fully realised now in most quarters. It looks like Apple, Nokia & Microsoft are aware of this, and certainly the browser on this N95 is attempting to bring the full internet to the phone. It works (flash & other video within browser being one of the big remaining issues), I can surf normal sites, but its always going to be more painful with such a small screen and no mose, compared to desktop browsing. Building little projector into the phone is one possible future answer, or unfolding/unrolling screens, if the tech reaches a good enough level. Certainly web developers were understandably not enthusiastic about having to make mobile compatible versions of their sites, and full broswers in phones will take care of this on one level. On the otherhand as I said previously, smaller screensie & limited controls will need to be taken account of to create the right experience for the user. Luckily this is no longer something that the site designers have to worry about. In this age of mashups & aggregation, its so much easier for someone else to get your core service/content and handle it differently for mobile users. I think Widgets fit into this nicely, they are a very similar formfacctor to what would work well on a 320x240 mobile device, and so I see a future where the main website will work on the phone, but may not be the best experience, so downloading a nice widget or other sort of client-side app, that expresses the underlying data/service in a mobile-friendly way, will become popular. Ajax may slightly complicate things in that it will often work on this new gen of mobile browsers, but may be rather clumsy to use (drag & drop is a no no on this n95 for example, apples iphone may well have the edge here). On the otherhand autocomplete is an ajax thing which is highly welcome on a mobile where you want to type as little as possible. > Interesting, this open source browser being a replication of apple > webkit... not actually another branch of the same code right? Im not sure what you mean by replication. According to their site "The Nokia Web Browser is built upon S60WebKit, a port of the open source WebKit project to the S60 platform. WebKit contains the WebCore and JavaScriptCore components that Apple uses in its Safari browser" http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/ > > The dominance of flash on the web as a video delivery package has > actually blown my mind and I'm quite happy about it, except for the > downloadability factor. Yeah. The thing I like about DivX browser plugin & the stage 6 site, is the prominence of the download button, which sits next to the large play con in the middle of the player window on the stage 6 site. Still at the end of the day it feels like the services/site who use flash are in the driving seat on this issue, if they make it real hard for users to download its usually because they dont want them to download. > > The sony PSP support for mp4 has helped your cause. I think we are > seeing more and more .mp4 files... personally I don't care for h264. > The hardware demands and compatibility aren't worth the jump in > quality or compression. I feel the same way about some of the codecs > in flash which are very processor intensive when they needn't be. I'm > overall very pleased with the majority of video sharing sites and > their ability to play well on older machines. Blip had some problems > with this at first, but I'm very pleased with their current player. > It didnt feel like the PSP helped at first because Sony mangled the format that worked and it had to have a PSP-specific adjustment. Its gotten better with newer firmware, I need to do some testing on this, certainly in theory the main part of the PSP mpeg4 & h264 spec should match ipod-compatible files quite well. Now the PS3 is on the scene and it also likes mp4 and h264 vidoe formats. I agree about h264 to a certain extent. I was an early supporter but realised after a while that Id have to wait a while for compatibility to increase. Im pleased with how soon a phone has arrived that supports it, so give it a few years and I think we'll see its adoption increase , its already come a long way in terms of how many vloggers are using it. And the baseline version that ipods etc use, is a bit less cpu intensive. Lets not forget that some of the early compalints about how hungry h264 is, was because the quicktime encoder is quite slow, and apple put all those HD samples up in h264 and confused the issue, people with older machines were not getting full framerate on that stuff. > Hmm... never thought of using flash to record on mobiles... can't imagine it. I mean it in the sense of how flash is used in the 'flashmeeting , or youtube post an instant video from your webcam' sense. So you could under certain conditions record live straight to a server, or participate in live video. This starts to overlap with what it sounds like Steve Garfield was experimenting with recently, live streaming from phone, albeit using different technology to achieve it. > > That said you can get rss mp4 feeds of most youtube feeds through > google video... I did a post on this recently at mmeiser.com/blog. > > But I'm off topic... I hope mp4 will become a defacto standard like > mp3... I see know other close competitor... I also think flash is VERY > secure in it's place for web based viewing... but that it will never > work for widespread offline viewing such as set top boxes, cell > phones, portable media players and more... portability is not the > issue... interface and interactivity are... these devices can't handle > advanced and varying interactivity in flash files. > I think flash could work in most of those scenarios, a lot will come down to commercial decisions and competition etc, and I guess what happens with DRM. If flash video support comes to mobile & other browsers, then the mainstram use of flash video, the likes of youtube and blip, will work and thus have their place on these devices. I dont expect them to become the main format the device can aggregate, playback, record, but as youve said, we'll just have to wait and see, Im just guessing. If it turns out that you can just use a different flash file thats more suited to mobile platforms as the player, and play the same flv as the desktop can, I think it will succeed. > Ultimately in order for web video to go mainstream, beyond the desktop > computer all technical issues such as compatibility need to become > completely transparent to the end user. "just press play" is the term > that comes to mind. Even downloading and caching must be transparent > or go away. >From the looks of it, most mobile designs have taken the opposite approach to downloading - they make it highly visible and often require user confirmation. This is simply down to the possible costs for the user, and the networks not wanting to have to deal with lots of users trying to get partial refunds for data they didnt specifically say they wanted at the time. This will hopefully fade as 'unlimited' data packages become more normal, but I think it will take a long time. > The masses aren't going to sit around with iSquint and rip movies for > their ipod. Agree. > > As bandwidth cheapens and bittorent or future peer based technology > gets more transparent it will make more and more sense to move these > formating issues into central locations instead of replicating the > time / cost to each individual user. > Ive always been a bit cautious about peer2peer stuff, partly because network havent factored so much user uploading into many of their equations. In the UK traffic shaping is now a reality with soe ISP's, others are investigating it, and for a long time very few of our 'unlimited boradband' deals have really been unlimited, with 'excessive' users penalised. Cheers Steve Elbows
