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Are Flash videos still acceptable…?
I have been away from video for a couple of years (or so it seems) – long story.
But I just saw an interesting product for sale by Digital Juice called Wildform Flash Video and animation bundle. Since I may be doing some videos for the web in the somewhat near future I was wondering if Flash was still a viable choice? Thanks and hello again. -
2 Replies
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As far as I know, Adobe Flash is alive and well and all over the net (just try surfing without a Flash plug-in and you’ll see what I mean). A new standard called HTML5 is supposed to be a “Flash Killer” and Apple wouldn’t allow Flash on it’s iPad so there seems to be a movement to replace it but it probably has a long life despite everyone trying to kill it.
Having said that, I would only use Flash for advertising animations. For delivering plain video, AVC/H.264 is emerging as the new web standard.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
And actually, if you create a Flash video using modern tools, it will contain H.264 video.
Like .MP4, .MOV, and .AVI, a Flash file is really a container, and supports several standards… nothing like AVI (Video for Windows, DirectShow) or .MOV (Quicktime). The older standards established were based on the On2 VP3 and VP6 video CODECs, but Adobe adopted H.264 some years ago.
Its possible to use both in the same web page, in theory. As with many HTML conventions, you can build a …. tag that will play a compatible file if the browser can support it, but drop back to a flash player if not. However, this is still a work in progress. And H.264 doesn’t have universal support yet. In theory, H.264 is supported in a tag in Google Chrome, Apple Safari, the new IE9, and many cell phones… however, they’ll probably reject higher resolution videos. Firefox and Opera don’t support H.264, but prefer WebM (Google’s new format) or Ogg/Theora (an updated version of VP3, with a kind of hacky container format really just designed to stream audio).
I actually tried this awhile back. I had been using Flash for online video, but including MP4/AVC files for download. Seems a no-brainer to skip the Flash part. I also tried WebM and OGV… this was a few months ago, and HTML5 is an evolving standard (due to be finalized by 2012), so maybe things are better. Anyway, I could see everything in Google Chrome. Safari choked on my HTML5 stuff. Firefox drew X’ed boxes and showed nothing.. it though it could play WebM and OGV, but failed, rather than fall back to Flash. Opera worked with WebM, but choked on OGV. IE8 doesn’t know and fell back to Flash as it’s supposed to.
In short, I didn’t bother with HTML5 just yet… Flash still works better. For now. I’d be kind of surprised if problems last much longer in this respect. And who knows… maybe I’m missing something, though the fact that it all worked in Chrome suggests otherwise.
-Dave
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