For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6.
The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM.
But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer.
It's much better than having plugins that do the same thing (if you use firefox you're used to Flash asking for trial Norton to be installed every time a security exploit is found in Flash). In the perfect world we wouldn't need it, but it leaves no excuse for media companies not to use HTML5.
It was positively mind blowing.
Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.
Luckily there was an alternative, Real Alternative, that enabled you to play the content without having to install that ghastly RealPlayer. It seems like the community always finds a way around crappy software.
For a real spit-take, though, put one of the companies that we think of today as Very Big Deals next to it for comparison. Like, say, comparing Apple's performance to RealNetworks' over the decade from 1997 to 2007:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
(I omit the last few years because AAPL has gone up so much over that period that if you include it you can't see the line for RealNetworks anymore. But check out how long it took Apple just to reach the heights Real was at in the late '90s.)
Or Adobe, all the way up to now:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
What killed them was the iPod. Or rather, computers and bandwidth improved so better quality compression could be used. Then RealPlayer limped along on name recognition alone. Although during the early days of h.264 it was the easiest way to play an MP4 on Windows.
I had been using ClickToPlugin under Safari to force HTML5 videos on sites (and mainly for a way to send YouTube videos to the AppleTV via AirPlay, as there was no other way to do it) but now all machines are Flash-free.
I think I'll have a coffee to celebrate.
I also recently discovered that the Crocodile Hunter at 1/2 speed is freaking hilarious. e.g.,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLIMgXv89VU&feature=youtu.be...
document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = 1.35Actually, come to think of it, both are good ideas.
Man this line is hilarious. Your DRM to block users from keeping the videos you are sending them is not making the experience faster or smoother. Don't try to pass off user-hostile proprietary blobs restricting the data on their computer as anything but a terrible blow to a free and open Internet.
You can say, "yay drm", but say "yay drm", not "yay drm, bullshit about faster and smoother". At least own up to the fact you are crippling UX for personal gain.
"Here, if we give you 10 million USD for free, can you just get your devs to use this untested pile of DRM?"
Really.
So my old tactic of open 5 tabs, maximise and watch one by one is completely nerfed
Of course computer itself plays 1080p h264 perfectly fine in mplayer, so I might end up writing javascript that fires mplayer with mp4 link (to stream rather than downloading whole clip) instead of displaying video in the browser :(
There used to be mplayer plugin for firefox a loong time ago, nowadays all browsers use building unoptimized codecs.
I'm hoping it's a local max/temporary decline for Chrome, but Firefox now feels like the lighter of the two browsers in my use.
I'm not sure if switching to CPU-only video decode will be a net gain for most.
There are a lot of people in places like that.
Also, Allwinner, Intel, Mediatek, and Rockchip all have SoCs announced with hardware VP9 decode: http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs (not sure how many of those are already shipping).
Apparently the stats on user engagement show improvement. It seems that initially they showed a lot of improvement, but then they realised they were comparing the average video against only the most popular videos in VP9 (since those made the most sense to transcode first) and obviously people are more likely to keep watching something really popular.
Once they took that into account they did identify that some older machines would have a degraded performance and therefore lower engagement with VP9, but the heuristic for avoiding them is "Running XP" so it seems that most modern machines have a better experience with CPU decoding of VP9.
I believe they were up to 60% of all desktop views in VP9 by the end of last summer, so I'd guess if it was going to melt anyones's computer it would have happened by now.
Also, the HTML5 player has a nice feature to change the rate at which the video plays, which makes watching long talks a lot easier.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...
ClickToPlugin is great IMO and it's kept me from switching away from safari for the longest time.
Every day the number of reasons to keep Flash installed gets lower and lower. I still keep it installed on my machine for the occasional site that still uses it, but Flash's days are definitely numbered. When a site as big as Youtube stops using it, that is when you know there isn't long left. Fortunately Adobe realised HTML5 is the future a while ago and have been creating some great tools.
Let's you do marks and loops as well as using the playback controls.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/flash_takes_a_blow_as...
Unless you hypothise that porn users not having flash installed is somehow a larger percentage compared to average web user not having flash installed?!
[1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsa1...
The only thing that seems to occasionally hang for a second or two is loading a pre-roll ad, but that's pretty reasonable given the additional processes around ad serving. On that note, pretty awesome that those are also HTML5...must be nice to be YouTube and control your own ad format.
Edit: For clarification, not saying I enjoy ads, but having dealt with the bizarre SWF formats that ad vendors pass along...
I think the problems started when they changed to the "adaptive" rate stuff; the players don't don't download the entire video file anymore, and instead they buffer in segments. Not only does this remove the ability to pre-buffer the entire video, the client seems to get out of sync with the server. The client ends up waiting forever, but the server isn't sending anything.
Fortunately, I was able to switch many of my friends over to youtbe-dl, and that fixed everything. Unfortunately, the article mentions the idiotic "encrypted medfia extensions" a one of the reasons for the changes to youtube; I wonder what additional useless hoops youtube-dl will end up having to have to jump through.
Is there a way around this? Do you think Youtube would be for or against that (i.e. do they really want me opening more than one tab?)
~$ cat .asoundrc
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
I think I actually prefer a working, portable Flash-based solution to that.
In not sure which are worst: Netflix and Google for pushing this bullshit into the browser & standard or uneducated users for swallowing it whole.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12A4345d Safari/600.1.4I know this only for research purposes of course...
Regardless, this is absolutely great. I haven't had flash for a while now and so it makes me happy to feel that HTML5 really is a valid replacement for most things.
Moving from flash to HTML5 adaptive bitrate is not trivial task and if you are familiar with MSE/EME, it shows how powerful the browser has become in delivering rich video content, either pre-recorded or live streaming.
With this, it seems to me there is a big gap now for encoding to new adaptive codecs, like MPEG-DASH and tooling to make something like livestreaming easy to do without flash.
Do you know by the way, is MPEG-DASH patent encumbered or not?
Has any streaming platform actually rolled out an implementation of this? And has anyone found a way to break it?
Note EME isn't "DRM" per-se. Its an interface to enable custom DRM implementations. There's not "one thing" to break. I'd assume Youtube would use Widevine (another google company) which supports EME.
Then I think I'm done with that extension.
[1] There's an initiative to play HLS videos without flash at https://github.com/RReverser/mpegts, but its too much heavy since the browser needs to change mpegts container to mp4.
Some notable issues I've run into:
- play.spotify.com, I used to use the web player on my computer, it requires flash sadly. I've started using their OS X app.
- twitch.tv if I occasionally watch a stream, also needs flash. I tend to turn it on for the duration.
It's pretty great and I'm enjoying better battery life, more efficient use of cpu.
Remember, this is the guy that controlled QuickTime and never opened it up. That was a bit of problem for open video supporters.
Also, the events described in your link all took place while Jobs was not at Apple.
"proprietary acceleration techniques"
http://web.archive.org/web/20010605082836/www.pa.msu.edu/~ha...
A whitelist + click for sound would be pretty much exactly what I want.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...
See:
As a test, I just popped open the first interesting looking video on my signed-in YouTube front page (my account has been set to HTML5 for a while).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRI3Ew4BvA
I'm not a fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but the video does have Lily Cole is in 1080p. Opera 27.0.1689.54 on Win 8.1 x64.
TL;DR: For now you need to use beta/aurora/nightly releases of firefox to enable 1080p/4K youtube with the HTML5 player.
Also Google Maps seriously lags on Safari. Do not like it.
http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...
http://fr.slideshare.net/touradj_ebrahimi/spie2014-hev-cvsvp...
edit: facts will get you downvoted on HN. Nice.