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And every other media library software does this. What they don’t do is make that the only way you can interface with your device.
If you’re going to have one piece of software required to do anything, that software has to be absolutely great. That’s why people say more about iTunes.
Oh, and iTunes is by far the most sluggish program I’ve ever used on my computer. I wonder what would happen if Microsoft suddenly made it so iTunes couldn’t run on Windows, like Apple did with Adobe Flash for the same problem.
Right now, I’m trying to back up my app purchases so I can upgrade the OS. It’s been 45 minutes and now it’s “Optimizing photos” Why is it optimizing 15,000 photos that are already on the freakin’ iPod?
Flash runs on OS X, just not very well.
It’s not included on the iPhone and iPad, but that’s not quite the same thing.
If you’ve ever used Flash on OS X you would understand why it is not on the iPhone just through sheer necessity. I doubt you’d even get a flash site to play at more than a few fps with the iPhone’s CPU.
To give you an idea:
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/3192/osxflashiplayer.jpg
That is a standard definition H.264 video stream that Flash requires 58% use of a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo to play back. The same stream (I mean the literally identical stream) in the Mac version of XBMC uses about 10% of the CPU.
Flash is not on the iPhone because it is literally unusable on a mobile device of that power. It’s barely adequate on OS X, because Adobe just doesn’t care about the platform. All the talk and fanfare about HTML5 has finally woken Adobe up and they pushed some changes out with the 10.1 beta for OS X that is better, but still pretty poor.
The sooner Flash dies, the better.
I never really understood the complaints about flash. Is the main problem with it just that it isn’t optmiized for Apple, or does it have issues in Windows as well? I never noticed flash video running slowly or being CPU intensive on my XP box, though occasionally RealPlayer will take a few seconds to open a several hundred megabyte flash video. But that seems normal; it’s not like several hundred megabyte AVI files open super quick either.
Hmm, I find it strange you’re using realplayer, the one major software package that’s worse than iTunes…
It’s not that it’s just not optimised for OS X, it’s as if there’s deliberate malice in making it perform horribly. I would make the analogy that it’s like a 100 m running race between Windows and OS X and they both have to carry flash, except that Adobe at least designed some rudimentary wheels for the cart tied to windows. It slows you down but at least it sort of works. For OS X though, they just tied a massive tractor tyre on, but laid on its side. They then added a couple of bags of sand for good measure.
I cannot emphasise enough just how shockingly poor Flash performance is on OS X. I know it’s pretty bad on Windows, but it’s a whole different ball game on the Mac. Adobe has come out with some handwaving about how “Apple are not exposing the needed APIs to them” and other such nonsense, which it just passing the buck since the necessary frameworks that they need are right there and well documented, and this “issue” doesn’t seem to have affected any other plugin makers on the Mac - even Microsoft’s Silverlight is pretty well behaved and performs quite well.
The image I linked above was a screenshot from my own computer - there’s no reason that in 2010 I should need 58% of my CPU power (a dual core intel 2Ghz) to play back a standard definition H.264 stream that XBMC can do on the same OS for 10 to 15% CPU use. There’s just so much cruft and crappy code in Flash.
All I can think is that it’s some sort of emulation wrapper around the Windows binary that adds a massive processing overhead. They can hide behind the increase in CPU power of modern machines and just “brute force” it, since it just about works if you have a powerful CPU.
The HD streams from BBC iPlayer will drop frames on my iMac when using the Flash player because the CPU is tapped out. Open XBMC and navigate to the same streams and they play beautifully with the CPU being nowhere near full use. Deduction: Flash is woeful.
(although, my HD catchup has been dashed since the BBC added swf verification to their steams, so XBMC can only play the first 2 minutes before the stream is dropped - you are now forced to use the flash player in the browser, so I am stuck watching SD streams on a computer that easily has the power to play the HD ones).
This is not just limited to video, and is not about hardware accelerated H.264 either, since software decoded H.264 on Windows is also significantly better. Regular non-video flash sites also suffer similar performance issues.
I “use” RealPlayer (along with FLV Player, VLC Media Player, and Windows Media Player) only in the sense that I have it assoicated with certain media types such that when I double-click them in explorer they get opened in the appropriate media player. For RealPlayer that amounts to flv and rm files. That is the sum total of my usage of any and all video players. (For audio I use a homegrown audio player I wrote myself.)
I cannot stand “media centers” and will never use such functionality. I find RealPlayer and Windows Media Player incredibly bloated much like I find iTunes incredibly bloated. I would hate it beyond all reason if, for example, I were forced to use RealPlayer media center crap to put audio files onto my mp3 player. (SanDisk Sansa Clip+)
I even have some MOV video files that I really do like to watch but I really dislike Quicktime so much I never installed it on this computer that I bought 2-3 years ago. So I don’t get to watch those. (That guy driving through France at 5am in particular is the greatest thing ever. Link. Stupid Quicktime.)
So the only reason flash is bad is because it doesn’t play nice with Apple?
That’s not what I said - you are twisting it. I wouldn’t mind it if they actually made a decent effort to make it work on OS X. There’s no reason for it to be so bad - even Silverlight works pretty well, and I don’t imagine Microsoft has any particular desire to “play nice” with Apple.
Adobe acquired Flash several years ago and since that time has let it languish on OS X citing “obtrusiveness” from Apple as the reason they couldn’t make it better when it was really just a lack of development on their part. Other plugin makers, even those working on flash content like On2, XBMC, FLVplayer etc were getting on just fine in the meantime.
So, we’re now in the situation where a large portion of the web turned to Flash because they can make websites look “nice”, which I don’t have a problem with (despite various issues with linking and indexing that make all-flash sites the stepchildren of the internet), but it means they perform extremely poorly on OS X.
My main concern now is that I can’t watch High Definition BBC content on iPlayer any more because of the addition of swf verification means I have to use Adobe’s Flash player in either Safari or Firefox and my computer just doesn’t have the power to play it back without dropping frames with the cruftiness of Flash doing the work. Some people have rebuilt XBMC with the modified rtmsp module that emulates the swf verification, but this is one of those legal grey areas, and the official XBMC client will not touch it.
Flash has ended up as the de-facto “standard” for rich web content, and video - and while it is a standard, the client is proprietary, and is really only any good on Windows.
I could run Parallels and a copy of Windows inside that, and then watch Flash content on that and it would perform better than the native Flash client (which I am assuming is the windows binary wrapped in emulation, since I know Adobe can write decent code when it suits them, they just didn’t think it was worth it for the Mac for Flash).
I’m pretty sure that is what you said; I don’t see how I’m twisting it. Let me try this from a different angle.
I’ve read on these boards several times people saying how bad flash is and how it needs to be gotten rid of entirely. I’ve never seen actual reasons posted, so I’m truly in ignorance.
What reasons make flash bad that have nothing to do with Apple?
Fair enough, but you can play FLV videos with VLC and rm files with any media player if you install the RealAlternative codec. VLC may play them natively too (it plays just about anything) but if not you can definitely watch all that stuff without having realplayer infect your system with its horribleness.
Actually I mispoke. I use the RealPlayer Download and Record Plugin for Internet Explorer all the time. That thing rocks almost as much as IE8 Accelerators.
Not that anyone asked, but I’m not kidding about Accelerators. I see a lot of hate for them elsewhere on the web, but to me they’re the greatest innovation I’ve ever seen now that you can create your own. I search on names all the friggin’ time, particularly actors and movies on imdb (or Mr. Skin to see if they get nekkid) and NFL players on pro-football-reference.com and Yahoo, but also the occasional word lookup or just simple google search.
I did one just a couple hours ago in a different thread when I wanted to be sure the movie I was about to post wasn’t already posted by an alias. (Like “Leon may be good, but The Professional is much better.” “Those are alternate titles to the same movie.” “Doh!”)
Here is a screenshot of that search I did. So easy, and so much cleaner now that figured out how to get rid of all the garbage Microsoft defaults into that menu. (And yes, I do use 800x600 resolution.)
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inability to index sites that use it for content and navigation, so a site like that is effectively a “blob”
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tough to bookmark individual pages, although this follows from point 1.
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much more limited access for those who need to use assistive devices/screen readers etc compared to regular websites.
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poor performance on low power devices (accentuated on Mac, especially PPC processors)
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while the format is open, the client is not and is only officially available for Windows, Mac and lately some Linux support, cutting off some sites for those not using those platforms.
Thanks much, that makes sense. When I hear “flash”, I basically just think of Youtube. Then I wonder what makes Youtube so bad that flash should be done away with completely. heh. Now I see what you’re saying.
Those are the points you should lead with, btw; not many Windows users are going to care about compatibility issues with Apple or Linux. As an example, do you care about compatibility issues with Internet Explorer? Like if, say, java didn’t play nice with IE, and a bunch of people starting raging on the internet about how terrible java is because it doesn’t work very well on IE, would you care even a little tiny bit?
Helluva Hello!
IMO- Itunes is Proprietary dog poop!
I have an mp3 collection from cd’s/media I own, of over 15,000 256mp3’s, including live recordings (legal).
6 years of collecting!
I have a home network with 6 pc’s/laptops.
I was gifted an iphone 3gs. Nice toy:dubious:
I installed itunes 10 on my main laptop (win7 64 tosh) and pointed the library to my mp3 directory.
I have always stored my mp3’s on an internal 2 tb sata drive installed on an XP pro tower (never has had itunes installed on it).
Once itunes has been installed on laptop, I now have NO access, by any means, other than itunes show file in explorer…
at first I thought it deleted all my files, the directories where there
with any jgp’s and such, just no mp3’s… :eek:
I finally right clicked the main mp3 folder/ properties,
to find files size 100+ gb’s still in the mp3 directory.
I freaked for a couple hours, cussed for a few more hours, spent more hours trudging the inet for answers (Finding this wonderful forum)
finally went to apple store :smack: to have only solution offered by pea brained store clerks, was to buy a MAC. :mad:
How do I regain access to my legally owned property that itunes refuses me?
Thank you for any HELP!
I just now realized this is year old post… my newbie is showin
You should have been around when iTunes first came out the. It was absolutely brilliant compared to WinAmp which, at the time, was essentially just a listing of songs and no real organization. This was back during the Napster days when people had all sorts of random tags on their downloaded mp3s. ITunes would just recognize the music and put it into organized folders.
Of course now, people that don’t like iTunes complain that it reorganized our music. But since I started my music library on iTunes 1.0, that organization is my organization and I love it. Every mp3 file is extremely easy to find.
ITunes isn’t slow for me either. A couple of loud individuals complaining that iTunes is bloated doesn’t make it fact. I wonder if the slowness of some people’s iTunes is actually caused by the fact that they wont let it reorganize their music.
I think there are plenty of people that like iTunes just fine, but they don’t feel the need to gush every time an Apple thread is started. The only things you see are the complaints.
You make a playlist of what you want to hear and load that playlist onto the ipod. Very simple. If you want to listen to part at home, make a for at home playlist. I have a sleepytime playlist of 9 hours of music I like when I want to sleep. I have a 4 or 5 hour playlist of raid music for MMORPGs, and I have a EVE Online playlist for when I play EVE Online. I also have audio books that I may listen to if I am in the mood.
Granted it is bloatware, but I can generally manage to get it to do what I want it to.