I think a lot of people would rather have slow Flash than no Flash. Besides, I’ve seen Flash stuff running OK on netbooks, and the iPad looks like it is a bit more pwerful thna your average Atom-based platform.
Sure, and I didn’t mean it to look like I thought the demise of Flash as a development tool would pull the rug from existing stuff (I don’t think that).
However, in order for Flash to die, one of (I think) two things would need to happen - either a different way to create new graphically-rich online games and animations arrives, or graphically-rich online games go out of fashion.
- that’s my question: if Flash is dying, is it being replaced, or becoming obsolete, and how?
I’m puzzled about the flash/netbooks thing. it works fine on the three Atom netbooks in my household. It worked just about OK (under Linux) on an ancient Thinkpad 240 I just sold.
Are you running them on a Linux or Windows? graphics support is a margin more developed on Windows. (I’d love to have more than an 8Gb SSD so I could dual boot…I prefer Ubuntu, but the netbook really ran well under XP)
I had to go verify my expeirence on the netbook…so, boot Ubuntu 9.10 (the latest), go to Hulu…
…Yup. It’s a pig. Button presses not detected, menu items caught in a half transparent state, when you DO get to the video, it’s a slideshow. Now that I think about it, I’m also running the beta for Flash that’s supposed to be faster, uses the GPU for rendering, and less main processor utilization, so it should be better, not worse.
(Which was my experience, it improved video playback on youtube)
Flash as the single technology to provide video is already on its way out (slowly, though). People may not be that interested in playing complex flash games on their mobile phone, but they probably do want to be able to watch youtube or the daily show etc.
On light-weight devices like phones and low-end netbooks, getting all of flash to run efficiently is only just possible; and I can only just about run (small size) youtube videos on my original eeepc - as long as I don’t try to click on anything else while it’s running.
Flash video just adds quite a bit of overhead that can be eliminated by using a native/built-in video player and a manufacturer can optimze a native player by itself instead of having to wait for Adobe to a) make a compatible flash player and b) make that player efficient enough to be useful.
Here you go. Embedded video for every system that currently supports it, and quicktime / flash as the fallback: code · Video for Everybody!
They’re all running Windows XP (all Atom 1.6 with 1gb RAM). I haven’t tried any of them with Linux yet - I’d be interested to see what Flash is like on Netbooks sold with Linpus preinstalled.
Flash is one of the only things that make my laptop grind itself into a white-hot death. 2-d, plain colored sprites should NOT take that much cpu.
Very interesting link. I have to say, though, that the Ogg embedded version used a lot more CPU when I watched it in Firefox 3.5.7, than Flash did in IE6. Could be something to do with my particular PC’s set-up, I suppose.
Intelligent Design? 
Using FF 3.6 at the moment: yeah, it does seem to use quite a lot of CPU time. I’m not sure how efficient firefox’s builtin decoder actually is. I suspect it’ll get better, but IIRC one of the reasons why there isn’t any video codec specified in HTML 5 is that Ogg/Theora is pretty much the only codec that’s not patented, but the H.264 standard (which is patented) has much more efficient decoders at the moment (including hardware decoding for low-energy devices).
So basically that means that safari offers built-in H.264 everywhere, including the iphone, but no Ogg (at least not on all systems). Firefox offers only Ogg/Theora because the licensing for H.264 is incompatible with the license for Firefox (at least in the US), and Chrome supports both.
What you’re seeing now is the difference between software that uses hardware acceleration (MUCH more efficient, but currently MUCH more likely to be proprietary) vs software that does the video rendering by itself.
THere is no incentive for adobe to address GPU acceleration in Flash…or rather, there’s no incentive for them to address is in all platforms that Flash is available in. Doing so would put them in the driver business, and I can see them not wanting to do that. They’re getting there, which makes me thing this is a ‘moment in time’ issue, but they’re not there yet.
Apple has a greatly reduced number of hardware platforms they have to write to, have access to the bare iron of the hardware, the proprietary code to access the hardware acceleration features, and has an incentive to get people to use h.264…which means they spend the time to spit-polish the product.
I don’t remember the actual ‘law’ of computation, but loosely paraphrased, you can solve a problem expensively, using specialized hardware, quickly, or using a generalized processor, slowly. Apple and Adobe Flash are currently at seperate ends of that value proposition…Apple is using the GPU (which was expensive until Nvidia/ATI made bajillions of 'em), and Adobe is using the CPU (Which is cheap, but slow for massively parallelised tasks like video playback.)
The upshot of that is: When you’re running off battery power, Apple’s implementation translates to better battery life…since battery life is key, they don’t want to use Flash. Flash is MUCH less efficient, but on a PC, you don’t much care if the CPU’s using 20% or 80% to show that video…if you’ve got enough, that’s all that matters.