Adobe Brings Flash-Free Flash To iOS Devices 178
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."
Flash plays video, but Flash != video (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a silly, biased article and summary. This does NOT bring Flash to iOS devices. This is merely Adobe spinning out a new version of their video serving software with a new protocol option than plays nice with iOS devices.
The things Flash is really good at -- multimedia experiences that can be delivered to a wide audience via a ubiquitous plugin -- are not emulated here. But way to go timothy for trolling! You wear your bias on your editorial sleeve.
Re:So the set is Zero (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately, I've been absolutely amazed at the amount of detail Flash games have gotten... my girlfriend plays Facebook games every now and then, and things like The Sims actually look better than their standalone counterparts - full screen native res and everything.
The games peg the CPU, of course, but hey, it's smooth ;)
Video playback, when it works, is also alright. Youtube's implementation works well... others... meh, often not so much. It even works well on my smartphone, so watching TV/Movies off of streaming sites at the gym is a favorite...
Now "Flash multimedia experiences" (i.e. Flash web sites) on the other hand, are atrocious - that's something that just absolutely needs to go away - but those seem to be limited to private sites and maybe just a few businesses these days (like restaurants... what is it with restaurants and Flash?). If these go away completely and the rest stays the way it is (OK, maybe a bit better hardware acceleration for the games, so the CPU doesn't need to work as much), I'll be more or less satisfied with my experience - on a year-old smartphone and a 3-year-old subnotebook, no less!
Excuse me - what's that again? (Score:3, Interesting)
This should mean that iOS devices will get much of the advantages of Flash video support, ...
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.
Seriously, why bother? This probably isn't going to work for those Flash ads that seem to be 90% of the Flash usage on the web (no loss there!); and for video you can simply encode in h.264 and tell the Flash plugin to pretend it's Flash video for those browsers that can't handle h.264 (Firefox, IE 8, Chrome if Google ever actually follows through). With the proliferation of Android and iOS devices that do h.264 quite nicely, I'd think it's smarter to go that route - which is basically the opposite of the one Adobe is trying to sell here.
Rental (Score:4, Interesting)
Transcode your video into mp4
Convert vector animation to compressed pixels and it'll become ten times bigger. See this comment [slashdot.org].
if you don't want someone downloading your video then don't put it on your website in the first place.
Then how would you recommend that the publisher of a video provide an electronic service with a revenue structure similar to video rental?