Adobe Releases Its Own HTML5 Video Player 139
An anonymous reader writes "Webmonkey has an interesting tidbit about Adobe's release of its own HTML5 video player: 'Adobe has released an embeddable video player that plays HTML5 native video in browsers that support it, and falls back to Flash in browsers that don't. It's cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don't support Flash. Using Adobe's new player, these devices can show videos in web pages without the Flash plug-in.'"
Re:Where is it? (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently, according to the article you have to use the Adobe Widget Browser: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/widgetbrowser.html
Re:Where is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where is it? (Score:3, Informative)
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/widgetbrowser/ [adobe.com]
Note to install "If you don't have Adobe AIR installed, you’ll need to download and install Adobe AIR."
Then on to ?
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Superb !! (Score:3, Informative)
It seems more like the system is designed to default to HTML5, but if the client can't view it, it will fall back to Flash. Granted, I'd rather the site/browser detect that for me.
Re:Great. And Flash continues to be a plague (Score:5, Informative)
FlashBlock.. Only play the flash that you want to play. no more cpu hogging!
Re:Superb !! (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a browser plug-in. It's HTML/Javascript code that you place in your page where you want the video to appear. It will try to use HTML5 first, and then use Flash if it fails.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Informative)
Adobe gave up on Flash having a monopoly on Internet video when they agreed to put WebM into Flash. They have completely shifted gears in their web strategy by promoting their software as tools to generate HTML5/etc-buzzword output. More and more, Flash will be driven even more in the two opposite directions it's been going for a couple years now: as an animation tool, eventually preferentially targeting SVG/canvas output; and as an application development tool, eventually preferentially targeting quasi-native environments like AIR.
Re:Superb !! (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that called... HTML5? Such as
<video>
<source src="file.mp4" type="video/mp4"/>
<source src="file.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
<embed>fallback flash player</embed>
</video>
Re:I'm working on a new Firefox / Safari plugin (Score:4, Informative)
When the GP said JPEG, he meant the one the people actually use.
Re:Slashdot: so dense it causes singularities (Score:3, Informative)
I see it as being beneficial mostly to the vast majority of web designers who don't actually know HTML and just export stuff directly from DreamWeaver or whatever.
I made that point in another comment. But I added: on second thought, maybe I don't want to see their videos.
But seriously, yeah. Adobe doesn't have a history of giving people good off the shelf web tools. To some extent, this is an improvement on that reputation. Just... not good enough.
Also, I haven't looked at this particular player, but I would hope it has a nicer set of controls than the default HTML5 video container's controls.
Default HTML5 controls are implementation-specific. The controls in what Adobe's pushing are lacking compared to, for instance, Safari's implementation. Adobe's offering has a "full screen" button which, in HTML5 mode, fills the browser window; Safari's default controls include a real full screen button. I imagine the Flash fallback has proper full screen as well. Adobe's offering is an old and broken solution that puts unnecessary JavaScript behind the selection of HTML5, has no fallback without JavaScript, and does a poor job at feature detection.
Your code is missing the critical part (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with your code is that content of the "embed" element. IE: You actually need to have created some .swf version of the video. It would be nice if you could just specify the video name and the client would either view it directly or - if it is not supported - convert it to flash and view it without you having to create a separate .swf file on the server.
If I understand TFA correctly, that's what this player does. Views the video as it should be done in HTML 5 but if that doesn't work, it is displayed automatically through Flash.
Re:Superb !! (Score:3, Informative)
It is just that. It's basically an HTML generator that generates HTML5 for you. I just tried it, the code is clean, it created valid HTML, basically it is very awesome. It has graceful degradation in place to insert the flashplayer. The HTML5 video is browser native, the Flash player is open source. Really, don't take my word for it but try it yourself. It's a pretty goddamn great solution from Adobe. Kudos to them.
Re:Lesson learned (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. The downloadable widget on that page is the tool used by web authors to embed the player. The user that visits a page that implements it won't need to download anything, as long as the user has a browser that supports HTML5 video (one of the two contesting formats anyways) or Flash installed.
Seeing as it's rather new, I'd say it will take a while for it to show up used somewhere. I'm stranged they didn't set up a demo page, though. Perhaps I should re-scan the article for links to one.