Jobs Says Flash Video Not Suitable for iPhone

Lev13than writes "Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said the iPhone won't be using Adobe Systems' Inc.'s popular Flash media player any time soon, saying the technology doesn't meet his company's performance standards for video. Jobs said the version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone while the mobile version of the media player is "is not capable of being used with the web." The comments come a day before Apple is set to introduce the company's plan for iPhone SDK, the software developers kit which will allow third-party developers to create applications that can work in conjunction with the popular handheld device."

Another way of saying that

[by Anonymous Coward]

the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad.

Re:Another way of saying that

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

Why is this a troll, its exactly what the problem is.
My n810 runs flash - badly - its advertised as working which it does but it drops frames with current implimentation.

iPhone/Apple users expect more and currently it can't be handled.

Not surprised

[nighty5 (615965)]

Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks on OS X. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%.

It's not to say its Apple's fault, but I think Adobe is at fault and I think their position won't change in any time soon.

Re:Not surprised

[ncryptd (1172815)]

It's much better on x86 -- it used to be absolutely horrid on the PowerPC platform. Given my past experience with Flash on non-x86 architectures, I'm not surprised that Flash on ARM isn't a high-performance solution.

Can't say that I disagree

[pembo13 (770295)]

I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video in both WindowsXP and Linux using Adobe's Flash plugin. The same machines played media via the divx plugin without issue (at much better quality)

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[sqrt(2) (786011)]

Videos turn into a slideshow on my 2ghz Turion running Ubuntu. If you're not using a powerful processor on windows flash will suck for you. Which is probably why I see so much hate for adobe and flash around here since we have a lot of non-windows users on this site and the flash experience is terrible. Adobe needs to shape up and make the linux version work as good as the windows one.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[n3tcat (664243)]

No they don't. They are making a lot of money right now without those things you mention. They don't NEED to change anything. But it would be really, really swell if they did.

Re:Can't say that I disagree

[Riktov (632)]

I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video in both WindowsXP and Linux using Adobe's Flash plugin.

Me, if the chicks are hot and the action's good, I get jerking regardless of format or buffering...

cf. the N800/810

[DingerX (847589)]

...which has Flash 9 fully implemented.

It works, and you can watch video with it, and with OS2008 it isn't half bad. But Flash is either on or off, and some abuses of flash can really slow down your web experience (e.g., try loading page full of flash video ads).

So, yes, you can get Flash on a mobile device (the n800 has an Arm9 @400 MHz, while the iPhone's processor runs at 620), but not a 100% reliable effort-free flash. Also, considering the iPhone's screen resolution, Flash would really suck on it.

A: Because it disturbs the flow of a message

[DNS-and-BIND (461968)]

Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line irritating?

Analysis

[DigitalisAkujin (846133)]

A lot of people will construe this as simply Apple trying to control media on the Iphone which although it does make sense that people would think this way, it's definitely not true.

Flash is optimized for windows. It has no where near the right optimization to run on OSX at full speed. Further compounding the issue is that the CPU must do all the decoding work where on a proper player the decoding could partially be offloaded to a GPU (in a full PC), or optimized CPU with support for certain optimized instruction sets.

Suits Me

[AndrewStephens (815287)]

Lets face it, Flash is used for four things:

Video: Flash video is becoming the dominant video delivery mechanism for the web, its only competition is Quicktime. Perhaps flash video does take large amounts of processing power to decode (the Wii certainly doesn't do a very good job), but I suspect that Apple doesn't care too much if people find a reason not to serve video content in flash rather than quicktime.

Ads and sneaky cookie storage: Flash ads are annoying, and rather worryingly Flash programs can store rather large amounts of data in a sort of large cookie on your computer. This is often used to identify a user even if they have disabled cookies. Good riddance.

Games: it is a shame that flash games will never work on the iPhone, but this is somewhat understandable. The iPhone does not have keyboard and the pointing device works in a very different way to a mouse. Most games would not work well without recoding them for the iPhone and battery life would be bad since the screen would be continually updating.

Apps: well actually there are only a handful of sites I know of the actually use flash for something that couldn't be done in HTML. Mobile Safari is actually one of the more capable browsers out there, even compared to desktop browsers.

Additionally, while I don't doubt there are technical reasons for the decision, Adobe and Apple have always had a love/hate relationship - there may be political reasons why Apple wants to shut Flash out.

Good for almost everyone.

[Rocketship Underpant (804162)]

The lack of Flash could be a pretty good thing as Mobile Safari grows in usage, and web developers begin taking it into account. We could begin seeing real movie websites again, instead of annoying Flash sites; and Flash ads overall will decline so that advertisers lose out on potential clicks from iPhone and iPod users.

Flash Video is a huge CPU hog

[Dwedit (232252)]

Flash is a huge, huge CPU hog for playing videos. It is also not the only way to play flash videos.
I have done comparative performance tests.
In one corner: Youtube's flash-based player
In the other corner: Windows Media Player + Gabest's FLV Splitter [sourceforge.net] + FFDSHOW [sourceforge.net].
When playing the same flash video, Flash took 40% CPU usage, and Windows Media Player took 5% CPU usage.
This just shows that Flash Player is extremely inefficient. Its performance gets much worse when showing a video in full screen.

Flash video is LCD video

[gordguide (307383)]

I'm not trying to defend Steve or even Apple. Bill and Microsoft have to share some of the blame, and I'm pulling out the stops and sending Real, Inc straight to hell. The short answer is the video wars are tiring, and consumers are simply tired of playing. No, I mean it.

Real is pure evil proto-spyware. Quicktime and Windows Media have fought it out for ... lets see here ... more than a decade? Can that be right? You bet it can.

So, the default Lowest-Common-Denominator format is Flash.

This-Is-Not-News.

It works, period. Quality? Not really there, actually. No, don't flame me. It's is truly a LCD format, a decade after video-on-the-desktop became a reality for both software and hardware. You could watch a decent quality 240x320 video in 1995. That, ultimately, is a very sad thing to say out loud, because this is 2008.

Flash is really not that great. Quality is frankly pathetic. I think that's what Steve was getting at.

But ...

You can view it on pretty much every computer today. Flash 1; QuickTime/WMV/Real 0.
It's widely supported on the web itself; every browser plays it when the page embeds it. Flash 1; Quicktime/WMV/Real 0.
It's not so great quality wise, but content providers WANT acceptable-but-not-one-pixel-more quality. Flash 1; Quicktime/WMV/Real 0.

What Steve, who you have to admit has this thing about quality, dislikes about Flash is the cheezy quality of the videos. I don't blame him nor can I say he is wrong. They are most certainly slow to load, CPU intensive, choppy/blocky/blurry things. But they work.

Steve wants video that looks good and works. I can't say he's wrong. Flash is weak in that area more than others.

So, let's put it into perspective here. Everyone talks about Blue-Ray vs DVD-HD but the real format war is still ongoing, and arguably less worth fighting over.

Can't we agree on a web video standard, where the codecs are built into every OS, consume reasonable resources, has some measure of copy protection ** and are viewable on everyone's OS, including the fringe OS's like Linux (which would not be a fringe if someone was selling it ... market share is more than just market share)?

I have my favorites. Don't get me wrong here. But, the video wars are too long with no winner in sight. I agree that Flash is not the ideal format, it's not even as good as at least 2 out of the three alternatives. But, Adobe has a vested interest in getting rich off of every OS out there, by controlling the creation of content, not the rest of the stuff. Apple, MIcrosoft and Real all had that goal in mind back in the early 90's; they've forgotten what they're fighting for now.

** Cheezy Quality = the modern day copy protection. Don't dismiss the value of it to content providers; they don't.

Re:"performance standard"

[deathtopaulw (1032050)]

that makes no sense, the more video/audio capabilities a device has the more people are going to buy it

remember apple makes money on the hardware not the songs/vids from itunes

Re:"performance standard"

[GauteL (29207)]

"I recently heard Itunes is the number 2 on-line music store: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/26/technology/itunes_walmart.ap/ [cnn.com] just behind Walmart, they can't sell this much music and not make money."

Correction. According to the article you reference, they are the number 2 music retailer, full stop. The are the clear number one in the online market, they just also happen to be so big that they have surpassed all the traditional retailers except Wal-Mart.

Your conclusions are surely right, however. I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information. The iTunes store surely makes money on it's own at this stage.

Re:"performance standard"

[ubernostrum (219442)]

So being number 2 store in a multi-billion dollar industry can be interpreted as not making money, right?

Maybe, maybe not. Apple's net profit -- the amount of actual money they make -- depends on the cost of operating the iTunes store infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, personnel, etc.) and on the fees they pay to the record labels for access to the music catalogs. From what I can find after some quick Googling, it appears that Apple pays 70 cents to the labels for each 99-cent download, which means that in order to turn a profit it needs to cost less than 29 cents per song to run the store. It almost certainly does, and the actual numbers almost certainly represent serious money, but suddenly it's a bit more debatable as to whether iTunes is a major cash cow in and of itself, or whether it drives hardware sales while happily turning a profit of its own.

Re:"performance standard"

[ronin510 (1113835)]

Have you used the iPhone? I listen to audio podcasts and watch videos directly through the Safari browser. Any website can provide such files without having Apple as a proxy.

Sure, there's the special YouTube application. What it basically does is link to h.264 converted videos, but as I said, any website can provide videos in that format. Having videos play via h.264 benefits iPhone users, and standards enthusiasts, actually. The iPhone has a dedicated h.264 chip to more efficiently decode such files. This is a much more energy efficient solution compared to decoding flash videos through software. So in truth, the "performance standard" you mock is a reality.

It's the API, stupid ;-)

[Kifoth (980005)]

Has anyone seen Flash's Actionscript lately? AS3 is a respectable programming language (Flame away :P). Considering that Jobs never wanted an iPhone API at all, if he lets Flash on the iPhone, he'll be opening the door to a rival API that he has little control over.

Re:"performance standard"

[bhtooefr (649901)]

Because the iPhone is downloading the H.264 vids direct from YouTube's site, rather than playing them in a flash-based player. ;)

Re:youtube, anyone?

[Zelos (1050172)]

IIRC, the iPhone plays Youtube videos converted to H264 using a native client, not Flash video.

Re:youtube, anyone?

[AceJohnny (253840)]

Flash video (flv) is a container around codecs, like AVI, OGG, and even MPEG is. The codec typically used in Flash is by On2 [on2.com], I believe. I guess Jobs is complaining about Adobe's mobile implementation of the decoder.

However, Adobe recently added support for H.264 in Flash. H.264 is more widespread and there are hardware-accelerated implementations for it in the mobile field. Youtube has started supporting that codec as well (add &fmt=6 at the end of video URL to try, if that video has been converted)

Hell, I worked on a mobile chip which includes MPEG4 and H264 encode/decode acceleration, which has been included in a recently announced Nokia smartphone [nseries.com], and I can confirm that On2 aren't accelerated (and Microsoft's VC1, used in DVB-H, is only partly accelerated), and thus have to run on the ARM core, at the expense of higher power consumption.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[vertigoCiel (1070374)]

...ie, your $600 toy has the CPU power of a TI-85. Enjoy playing text-mode Tetris on it, though...

The iPhone is one of (if not the most) powerful smart phones on the market in terms of processing power. Or do you know of a smart phone that does support full Flash (not Flash Lite)? Extra points if the battery life is longer than ten minutes.

Okay, that one doesn't even make sense. Unless it in some way requires use of the cellular-telephony-specific hardware in an iPhone, it will work "with the web", on a PC (or Mac, as the case dictates).

He's referring to Flash Lite, which is typically used to provide a UI layer for mobile devices. It doesn't even support the most recent version of Actionscript (which has been out for almost two years). The mere idea of navigating any modern Flash website with Flash Lite makes me cringe - which is what he meant by "not capable of being used with the web."

Once again, Master Steve turns the screws, and the fans will cry out, "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

I do a fair amount of Flash development, and even I don't like the idea of Flash on my iPod Touch. If not having Flash on a mobile device is wrong, baby, I don't wanna be right.

Re:Nice way of saying...

[dwater (72834)]

while the mobile version of the media player is "is not capable of being used with the web.

Okay, that one doesn't even make sense. Unless it in some way requires use of the cellular-telephony-specific hardware in an iPhone, it will work "with the web", on a PC (or Mac, as the case dictates).

I think he's alluding to the fact that the mobile version of flash just doesn't do the same things as the desktop version. I don't know the details, but there are significant gaps in functionality. There was a fairly recent version of flash which was more useful, on S60 at least, but, again, I don't know the technical details.

Here [allaboutsymbian.com]'s something for you to read. Maybe it sheds some light on it.