amungus
Premium
join:2004-11-26
America
clubs:
| eh
Well, can't say I'm a fan of either. MS is a little late to this party though...
Flash video CAN look good, but I rarely see any sites actually use high quality flash video, especially when full screen.
Most flash video I've seen also doesn't scale well when full screen - looks horribly pixellated.
Hate to say it, but I've seen more realplayer and windows media video scale much better when in full screen.
We should really be settling in on some standards for quality these days, especially with more and more people having high speed connections. Seems like flash video is largely a step backwards.
Just because (almost) everyone has flash shouldn't mean that it should be a standard for video. It's already horribly CPU intensive for what should be simple tasks, and it started out being more for simple animations etc. as opposed to other, more well established methods for displaying video on computers via network connections. Those solutions use FAR less CPU, scale better (in most cases), and have proven easy enough to stream to massive amounts of people.
Might as well just settle on some MPEG4 based video, and make sure it looks good no matter what you're watching it on - PC, TV, "insert mobile device of choice here...".
It's just sad to see video, which used to be a whole separate world from computers, be trashed so badly these days. Even MPEG-2 (which cable now uses even on 'analog' channels), can really get ugly after being recompressed too many times on its way to the home - "Broadcast Quality" video used to mean something, and it's sad when that gets pixellated, jittery, just sucky in general, even on 'analog' channels, let alone internet video.
We should already have "Broadcast Quality" for the 'net by now. Sure, there should be slightly lower quality types depending on speed, and HD quality for sure, but there really ought to just be a standard we can all agree on, and then if flashy, silvery, whatever comes along, I really wouldn't care... I'd rather keep my CPU cycles doing something else, like, I don't know, FOLDING @ HOME  |
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EPS
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA | Well HTML5 is supposed to introduce the [video] tag, which will allow for embedding videos without the use of flash. Unfortunately, the video tag isn't supported by any browsers as of yet, though I think Firefox 3.1 is supposed to have it? |
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quetwo
That VoIP Guy
Premium
join:2004-09-04
East Lansing, MI
| reply to amungus
Flash Video can do HD video using H.264. It was introduced about a year and a half ago. »www.adobe.com/products/hdvideo/hdgallery/
The problem is their content delivery network dosen't know how to do streaming video over the net... I'm sure they'll figure it out. |
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Mashiki
Balking The Enemy's Plans
join:2002-02-04
Woodstock, ON
 ·Bright House
·Rogers Hi-Speed
| Still needs a lot of bandwidth, but then again originally most stuff was locally cached for people to either download then watch or directly streamed from the site with a huge buffer.
As bandwidth catches up the problem will go away. Vimeo is a good example of a site where most of the content is in HD, but is locally cached. |
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quetwo
That VoIP Guy
Premium
join:2004-09-04
East Lansing, MI | Another site to look at is hulu. All Flash Video there too... |
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