Skyfire For Android Enables (Some) Flash Video

harrymcc writes "Skyfire, a browser formerly available only for Windows Mobile and Symbian, is releasing a beta for Android. The most notable feature: It can identify Flash video on Web pages and convert it to HTML5 and H.264 on the fly, so it'll play on Android phones. It doesn't support all video, and may be rendered somewhat superfluous when Adobe ships Flash Player 10.1 for Android — but it's an impressive trick."

Is it a security nightmare like opera?

[h4rr4r]

I would rather not have someone recording every page I visit, which is what opera does with its man-in-the-middle attack is a feature browser.

Cool, how can I block it?

[straponego]

Does anybody know if the default Android browser will allow blocking Flash when 10.1 ships? I think it's possible that I might find a use for a Flash program on a phone sometime, but if I can't block it by default I'd rather not have it at all. Screen, bandwidth, CPU and battery are at a premium on mobile devices. I'd rather not sacrifice them so I can watch a visual bedlam of ads for products that I will never buy (if you throw Flash ads at me, I boycott you. Ads only affect my buying choices negatively; so really, I'm doing you a favor by blocking your ads, marketing weasels. And I'm saving you money too!).

Android does support Flash?

[BlueBoxSW.com]

I just kind of assumed with all those bashing the iPhone for not supporting Flash that Android did it out of the box.

Is there any mobile that supports full Flash well?

It is not a discharger

[Ilgaz]

If vendor of device is wise and OS is open enough to talk to chips, H264 will be possibly decoded on chip. Just like my Nokia does while running flash embedded video. Of course, it is a video and video does have some load on battery, just like if I launched a m4v from its file browser.

Please don't get brainwashed by Steve. Today, a Mac Mini having Nvidia 9400, Flash 10.1 does play 1080P HD video with 4% CPU, if it is running Windows. If it runs OS X, it uses a lot of processing power since until 10.6.3, there was no way to talk to GPU to do its job.

Re:What could go wrong?

[wvmarle]

That depends on whether they're really "transcoding". Most Flash these days is H264 anyway, so it might just be doing something to bypass Flash and give the device access to the video stream.

Sounds very reasonable, and also immediately explains why it "doesn't support all video" as the summary indicates.