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IOS Iphone Media Media (Apple)

Adobe Adopts HTTP Live Streaming For iOS 97

Posted by timothy
from the enough-is-enough dept.
unassimilatible writes "Ars Technica reports that Adobe has capitulated in the iOS-Flash war, and has adopted HTTP live streaming for iOS. HTTP Live Streaming is a protocol that Apple developed to stream live and recorded video using standard HTTP connections instead of the more difficult to optimize RTSP. It uses H.264-encoded video and AAC or MP3 audio packaged into discrete chunks of an MPEG-2 transport stream, along with a .m3u playlist to catalog the files that make up the individual chunks of the stream. QuickTime on both Mac OS X and iOS can play back this format, and it is the only streaming format compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch."
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Adobe Adopts HTTP Live Streaming For iOS More

Adobe Adopts HTTP Live Streaming For iOS

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  • Re:More difficult to optimize? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gig (78408) on Saturday April 16, 2011 @07:35PM (#35843850)

    One issue is some networks block RTSP, but not HTTP.

  • Re:More difficult to optimize? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Saturday April 16, 2011 @07:39PM (#35843868) Journal
    The patent system works in mysterious ways, so there certainly could be a giant clusterfuck of submarine patents lurking out there; but the RFC was released in '98, and the list of vendors and OSS projects with source, sink, or both support is not a short one(and includes Apple's own proprietary OSX server media streaming package). Whatever video/audio codecs you are streaming on top of RTMP are almost certainly going to land you in a giant heap of trouble; but I would expect RTMP itself to either be harmless or driven into some sort of cross-licensing stalemate by now. Individual vendor extensions, of course, particularly DRM related ones, for which the DMCA can come to the field, are presumably a mess; but Apple's ability to say "The RTMP that is real RTMP is the RTMP that iOS recognizes as such, suck it down." would seem to be equal to its ability to say "HTTP live streaming is the new flavor of the month. RTMP is dead."

    I'm certainly not up on the details of live media streaming; but I've never seen a clear breakdown of why RTMP is obviously fucked compared to the alternatives.

  • Re:Not all optimization is technical in nature. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by immaterial (1520413) on Saturday April 16, 2011 @08:08PM (#35844002)
    What are you smoking? "HTTP" has zero "buzzword-factor," and the average Internet user (clueless executive or otherwise) doesn't connect it with anything, beyond (maybe, if they're paying the slightest bit of attention) "those pointless extra letters in the address bar."

  • There Goes My Undeserving Superiority (Score:3, Insightful)

    by selex (551564) on Saturday April 16, 2011 @08:23PM (#35844036)
    Now I can't stick my nose up at all those iPhone uses when I show them Flash enabled web content on my Droid. Thanks Adobe. Selex

  • You know what? I don't think it is so much that "flash sucks" so much as when Adobe bought it they didn't really have a game plan and the code they had only ran on win X86 and frankly that is the same to this day. Flash on win x86? It runs just fine. Runs fine in Win X64 since the browsers are all 32 bit. Everywhere else? Steaming pile of stinky.

    So it looks, just from me watching the history of the thing, that they made the classic buyer's mistake. they probably let everyone that was really good at the code behind flash waltz out the door and then milked it for all it was worth. But times change, win x86 isn't the end all be all anymore, and it looks like Adobe simply hasn't been able to keep up.

    But then again Adobe never were the brightest bulbs in the sign. Macromedia Xres was a great image manipulation software that they could have sold very nicely in the low to mid market, and used it as an upsell to Photoshop. They have also bloated the living shit out of PDF by jamming everything AND the kitchen sink into what was supposed to be a portable office format, not a fricking office suite or multimedia presentation, with predictable results.

    So to me the questions are thus: Will Adobe be able to adapt, or will they go the way of the 8 track? And if flash goes tits up, what will replace it? Because frankly from what I've seen HTML V5 sucks on less than a dual core unless you have some sort of acceleration for it. H.26x is great and does have acceleration, but FOSS won't touch it because of patents, WMV is okay but only on Win, Quicktime sucks, Theora would have been great 10 years ago but sucks now as it eats too many cycles for less quality than H.26x, so what is left?

    Because I REALLY don't want to go back to the 90s, with a dozen competitive formats all with bugs and hassles, and since it looks like Apple and MSFT are sticking with HTML V5 H.26x that will end up fractured. Sigh, I have a feeling it is gonna be a big clusterfuck like the 90s all over again. Say what you want about flash, but at least every machine from a PIII to the latest multicore could run it, and nearly everyone already had it installed.

I only know what I read in the papers. -- Will Rogers

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