HeXen FONT!!!!

[Chris]

Sure, you can use a media player plugin, but then it's anyone's ballgame as to who's media player is actually going to be used: QuickTime? WMP? RealPlayer? VLC? gstreamer? Something else?

The one the user has set. I sure as heck know what I want to use better than some web site.

With flash, everyone gets the same UI

Hardly. Almost every site has its own flash player, with its own UI layout. A media player plugin will be consistent with the user's system, a flash player won't be.

and codecs

I'll give you that, but that's not always a good thing. For one, the codecs used are widely available anyway. It's not difficult to get them. And the big one (mpeg) comes with Windows and OSX (and if a Linux system doesn't have it, it's due to the distro's stance against patented software, in which case the flash player won't fare any better).

And two, how you can plug in new codecs for it? When will we see Ogg Vorbis (compresses better than mp3), Speex (compresses extremely well for voice audio), Theora (XviD-level video), or Dirac (something to rival h.264, apparently) work? All of them are open, too, but I don't see Adobe rushing to support them.

And it took flash how long to support h.264 video, while media players could handle it fine? Before that, all it could handle was crappy MPEG-1 quality videos.

I'm fairly sure that's why google went this route, anyway. Why do you consider it to be an abuse of flash?

Because flash wasn't designed to stream video or sound. It was designed to play animations with some sound effects capabilities. Some genius thought "hey, I can make this play a video!" and, well..

[Ceeb]

Or when you are on a slow Internet connection and you have to wait for a flash site to load only to find what you had waited for was nothing more than a fancy menu that you just want to click past anyway.

Hell, even on a fast connection, flash is slow loading enough to be frustrating.

And then it usually comes hand-in-hand with some "clever" graphics or system that actually makes it harder to navigate the site you have visited. 9 times of of 10, if I arrive at a flash driven site, I leave it pretty quickly, often before even the menu has loaded.

This. I'm the one person on the internet who still has dial up. It's bad enough that every time I turn around, everyday files weigh a few more megabytes, but when websites start tossing flash at me when text and an animated gif would suffice...

[bagheadspidey]

Ok, last one and after this I'm done. Trust me, I probably dislike flash as much as you do, maybe more considering my line of work, but I feel like I started something now so I may as well (try to) finish it:

Media player plugins: you and I know what plugin we have set, because we set it the way we like it, but I can guarantee you something like 90% of casual users have no idea what plugin they have set, nor do they know how to set it or even care... on a windows system all these plugins battle for king of the mountain and the user is none the wiser. Just trust me on this one.

With flash, everyone gets the same UI

Hardly. Almost every site has its own flash player, with its own UI layout.

What I meant was, a particular flash-thing from one site will look / act the same to all users of that site, not that every site's flash content looks the same (which would be silly).

A media player plugin will be consistent with the user's system, a flash player won't be.

Unless you're using windows + quicktime, or windows + realplayer... in those cases the ui still won't match the system =/

ogg in flash: article | example (as you can see this could be applied to other codecs as well -- sure it's a hack, but hey, it works.)

"Because flash wasn't designed to stream video or sound." -- If that's true, how do you explain the existence of FLV?

ok, seriously, now I'm done ;p

edit -- wait, not quite. As for the "slow on dialup" thing, I think that's actually the most legitimate complaint I've heard in this thread yet...

[Chris]

Media player plugins: you and I know what plugin we have set, because we set it the way we like it, but I can guarantee you something like 90% of casual users have no idea what plugin they have set, nor do they know how to set it or even care... on a windows system all these plugins battle for king of the mountain and the user is none the wiser. Just trust me on this one.

Yeah, I know a good number of users are ignorant about that stuff. But it makes me feel like we (as in, the people who properly take care of their systems and set them up right) are being penalized because of it. And at least with media player plugins, if the plugin you're using breaks, you have the option of picking another. Plenty to choose from on all OSs. If flash breaks (and it does quite often), you have no recourse.

What I meant was, a particular flash-thing from one site will look / act the same to all users of that site, not that every site's flash content looks the same (which would be silly).

Assuming flash even works, that's true.. if someone takes enough care to properly design it. Most don't.

Unless you're using windows + quicktime, or windows + realplayer... in those cases the ui still won't match the system =/

Still would fit better than a flash-based one.

ogg in flash: article | example (as you can see this could be applied to other codecs as well -- sure it's a hack, but hey, it works.)

pure ActionScript 3 implementation of the Ogg and Vorbis libraries

Yeesh. I can only imagine the CPU consumption trying to do something resource significant, like Dirac. Also bet it can't offload video processing onto capable GPUs.

And being that it requires largely reimplementing the decoder, and again being at the whim of the flash author instead of the user picking the decoders for their system, it doesn't count. I can't, for example, put an Ogg or a Dirac video up on Youtube and tell users they need to install the right codecs to play it.

"Because flash wasn't designed to stream video or sound." -- If that's true, how do you explain the existence of FLV?

FLV is the MPEG-1 quality video codec I mentioned before. Just because it was added to the core flash player doesn't mean it was designed to do it. For example, there is no way to properly output the YUV video data most codecs decode to, thus no way to efficiently send it out to the card. It has to be further decoded to RGB, applied to a surface, then that surface be "painted" onto an animation.

There's also no way to modify the settings for caching or decoding quality.. so if you're on a slower connection, you can't increase the cache size. Or if you're on a slow CPU, you can't turn down the quality.

edit -- wait, not quite. As for the "slow on dialup" thing, I think that's actually the most legitimate complaint I've heard in this thread yet...

Forget the "on dialup" part. It takes between 5 to 10 seconds to simply load the plugin, on an Athlon64 X2 4200+. Pages are less responsive, and it works just slower in general than a proper HTML page.

[leileilol]

Flash can deal with MPEG4 too btw.

Also flash plugin takes less than a second to load here - what kind of old version are you running!?! Whatever the age it is, it surely is the limit on your view of Flash in general (which in this case, is supposed to be for a typeface subsitute of static text, in which Flash 4 swfs would work fine for, and be compatible with Gnash)

[Chris]

Flash can deal with MPEG4 too btw.

That's h.264 (aka unconstrained MPEG4; DivX and XviD are based on constrained MPEG4.. constrained so that they could be decoded in real-time on the processors available at the time it was introduced).

Also flash plugin takes less than a second to load here - what kind of old version are you running!?!

Whichever the last version available is. Quite recent. And its always been this way.

And unfortunately Gnash and its ilk are only useful as replacements for Adode's flash, for open-source afficionados (I have no problems with closed-source stuff, fyi; I just have a problem of being forced to use something I don't want to for no reason, especially when alternatives have proven to be better, eg. in the case of flash video players). Gnash and them can't be used side-by-side. And they're even slower than flash, too, and don't have anywhere near the capabilities of handling flash9 (let alone 10).

[MartinHowe]

And then it usually comes hand-in-hand with some "clever" graphics or system that actually makes it harder to navigate the site you have visited. 9 times of of 10, if I arrive at a flash driven site, I leave it pretty quickly, often before even the menu has loaded.

Amen to that, brother.

Also, some of those also have such flashy graphics (sorry!) that no epileptic should ever visit them - Zoe McConnell this means YOU! Even her current website doesn't work at all when flash is not enabled.

[Skippy]

The argument that Flash sucks because many pages using it are travesties of design (which they are) is a shitty argument along the lines of ''feature X shouldn't be implemented in ZDoom because of abuse blah blah blah'. If a web page is guilty of overt Flash wankery to the detriment of the user experience, ignore it.

In terms of the potential for bloat and poor design, Flash is no worse off than basic HTML. I would rather navigate a well-designed and elegant Flash site than a hacked-up HTML/CSS one (see the various MySpace abortions for several examples), and the advent of AJAX-powered web apps is rapidly shifting the highwater mark for page bloat and unresponsiveness IMHO (again, due to poor use of the tech).

For me, a cleanly-designed, aesthetically pleasing and standards-compliant XHTML/CSS page will always be best, but the Web is an open forum for innovation and a cesspool of competing standards at the same time - it's hardly surprising that design-led sites want to provide a rich media experience and eschew the (percieved) pube-wrenchingly frustrating hacks required to develop such a site in a cross-browser compliant fashion.

When a page's textual content is hidden from the browser so as to be seen only by the flash plugin, it means that, for example, blind people who use speech synthesis software to read webpages can't use your site.

Any developer worth their salt will populate their Flash movie with content from a database and serve a standard page with the same content if the Flash Player plugin is missing.

[Rachael]

The argument that Flash sucks because many pages using it are travesties of design (which they are) is a shitty argument along the lines of ''feature X shouldn't be implemented in ZDoom because of abuse blah blah blah'. If a web page is guilty of overt Flash wankery to the detriment of the user experience, ignore it.

I'm sorry, but I don't like Flash, mainly because it allows people to be such idiots and abuse it. And like I've said in a previous post, most sites, you're missing absolutely nothing by keeping it blocked. Those sites that are flash-only are not worth the mere few kilobytes of data it would take to transfer them. They suck, and I'm glad I don't have to see them. That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.

Any developer worth their salt will populate their Flash movie with content from a database and serve a standard page with the same content if the Flash Player plugin is missing.

I agree. And any developer not worth their salt, it's not worth seeing their work anyhow.

[printz]

Well, I like Flash, and the reason I like Flash is that I can easily play games on it

Overall, cool website feature they are. They're even used to produce TV cartoons, so heh.

And I much prefer Flash popups over window popups, really. The Flash ones seem more compact and better focused on the ad.

[leileilol]

I'm sorry, but I don't like Flash, mainly because it allows people to be such idiots and abuse it.

well so does HTML, Java, Javascript and CSS, but you of course won't pick those with Flash being the main enemy in this thread

I MEAN wtf
http://homestarrunner.com

MOST AMATEUR ABUSE OF FLASH EVER RECORDED ON THE INTERNET
i mean goddamn they should delete all files and do everything on htms.
chris is right
let's bomb everybody down to netscape 2 compatibility so everything can suit his agenda

[Gez]

well so does HTML, Java, Javascript and CSS, but you of course won't pick those with Flash being the main enemy in this thread

HTML (and XHTML) would be kind of difficult to avoid when browsing the web. I suppose you could use text files only, but then what's the point of using http:// instead of gopher:// ? CSS are actually preferable to having all layout and formatting in HTML. Java and JavaScript, they're blocked on my PC except for a few whitelisted servers and temporary authorizations. (Likewise for Flash. And even cookies.)


Flash has its uses, sure. The problem with it is that it suffers from the "hammer" syndrome. Too often, people will do everything on a website in Flash even whe, it's not justified, thinking that screws and bolts are just like nails because they really love their shiny hammer.