Adobe Brings Flash-Free Flash To iOS Devices

CWmike writes "At long last Adobe Flash has come to an iPad or iPhone, writes Jonny Evans. Adobe appeared at Europe's NAB equivalent, IBC, this week to introduce Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 and Adobe Flash Access 3.0. Adobe's solution repackages content in real-time, changing the protocol to suit the target device, HTTP Dynamic Streaming or HLS, for example. This should mean that iOS devices will get much of the advantages of Flash video support, without the processor degradation and battery life cost of the format in use on other devices. 'With Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers now have a single, simple workflow for delivering content using the same stream to Flash-enabled devices or to the Apple iPhone and iPad,' Adobe says."

Re:along with

[North Korea]

If it's streaming using HTTP, then there has to be vulnerability in the browser. It has nothing to do with the client side Flash, this is for Flash media servers. Furthermore, this doesn't bring the full Flash in to iDevices, only media streaming. Flash is a lot more than that. People seem to forget that every time. It's also one of the reasons why HTML5 video will never replace Flash completely.

And say what you want about Flash, but web would had been much more boring place the last 10 years if it wasn't for Flash. It also brought casual people to internet.

Re:Flash plays video, but Flash != video

[bradgoodman]

Correct.

It merely takes the Flash video that an Adobe Flash Media Server would send out via Flash's proprietary RTMP (or HDS) protocols, and does some real-time repackaging of the video, so it can be streamed out via an Apache server which is co-installed on the box. The Apache server streams the content out via HTTP as individual MPEG-TS fragments, compatible with Apple's HTTP Live Streaming.

Since both HDS (Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming) and HLS (Apple's HTTP Live Streaming) use H.264 video - there is no transcoding involved, only a simple dynamic repackaging to convert between formats.

Re:Why would that work anyway?

[Nerdfest]

Out of curiosity, I just tried a few flash games on an Android phone. Maybe I was just lucky, but the first 3 I tried worked fine. Crappy games, but they did work.

This is a bad solution

[Kagetsuki]

Seriously, the HTML5 video tag works - just start using it. The problem here is of course dynamic streaming (and a few other things) but the thing is Flash can stream mp4 files just fine - internally it's the same stuff with just the flv container being different. Transcode your video into mp4, if Flash loads play it in Flash (or even better give the user an option), otherwise use an HTML5 fallback. If both of those cases fail direct your users to download a browser that doesn't suck or something.

Oh, and the whole process I just outlined is something you can do easily with a variety of libraries and modules, just search for it. Oh, and cut out the whole trying to stop people from downloading video by wrapping it in 8 different concentric SWF interface wrappers - if you don't want someone downloading your video then don't put it on your website in the first place.

One more time with the quote tag fixed!

[Cyberllama]

Erm, I meant that the other way around. Serving Flash to devices that support it, and non-flash video to those who don't. In other words, Adobe's own server software doing exactly what you suggest it should do.

And what are those advantages, actually? As far as I can tell, the "advantage" is mainly to content producers who haven't updated their skill sets since around 2002. And these tools cost a pretty penny.

The advantage is that HTML5 video tags do not support anything with DRM, and sadly there are many content producers who will not allow their content to be available without DRM. As a result, there is always going to be video content exclusive to Flash that iOS devices miss out on. I don't actually know how Adobe expects to get around there here (since they are effectively serving up HTML5 video in h.264), but I suspect sites that are concerned about DRM simply won't use this feature.

P.S. I need to go to sleep.

Vector animations

[tepples]

Fuck games, if the game developer want his game out on iOS device he have to do it the right way: make an app.

In other words, Apple just wants the $649 to put a Mac mini on each developer's KVM switch plus $99 per year from each developer, and it also wants to waste developers' time to rewrite the game from scratch in Objective-C.

Video using a compressed pixels codec can be taken care of with HTML5. How can vector animations (e.g. Homestar Runner) be taken care of? Converting an SWF animation to H.264 bloats it by a factor of ten or more in my tests, which makes a 2 GB/mo plan feel like it's 200 MB/mo.