Jobs Says Flash Video Not Suitable for iPhone 387
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."
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
If flash is slow then what is quicktime? (Score:3, Interesting)
youtube, anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can't say that I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Another way of saying that (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:"performance standard" (Score:2, Interesting)
Flash Video is a huge CPU hog (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:"performance standard" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice way of saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the API, stupid ;-) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nice way of saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Here [allaboutsymbian.com]'s something for you to read. Maybe it sheds some light on it.
Quicktime is very good (Score:5, Interesting)
Requiring me to reboot my iMac to install that new version.
I think they make the windowms machines in my house reboot out of sympathy.
I have to agree with what you put forth. Compared to other players I have always found quicktime to be a dog, especially when embedded in a browsers
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the codecs, but the implementation (Score:2, Interesting)
The flash video codecs aren't really that cpu intensive. You once were able to download for example the youtube videos in flv format from cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=<youtube_video_id> (I tried this now, and it didn't seem to work anymore). That video could then be played with MPlayer, to mention one *. Unfortunately, MPlayer was not able to play all videos (I guess that's because flv is actually a container format, and can have several codecs). But those videos that did play, plaid with a much better performance.
I don't really think that it is the codec that is the problem. I guess that the biggest problem is that Adobe refuses to use any of the acceleration techniques for the playback. While that probably makes the code much more portable between different architectures and operating systems, it really is a performance bottleneck.
*) That's what the uktube of ukmplayer (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/ukmp/ [maemo.org]) does on N8x0. It seems to do some further tricks with the url, and therefore works even though the cache.googlevideo.com doesn't work anymore.
Re:Flash video is LCD video (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
GNASH: FOSS Player (Score:4, Interesting)
Will GNASH [wikipedia.org], the FOSS SWF player that can also play FLV, run on an iPhone? GNASH isn't as crippled as Adobe's Flash player, offering higher framerates on lower grade HW. GNASH has also been ported to run on more HW than Adobe's Flash player has. For GNASH to play FLV, it needs ffmpeg or GStreamer to run - is there a port or equivalent for iPhone?
And if not, who will take the plunge to port this FOSS to iPhone, and make Steve Jobs for once look less than visionary?
Re:"performance standard" (Score:2, Interesting)
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107357&p=irol-reports [corporate-ir.net]
doesn't break out their income by product group, but it does list $2.5 billion in sales for "Other music related products and services", and I don't see any complaints about costs in operating it, so they are probably at least breaking even.
It could still be a loss leader of sorts, in the sense that it could have much lower margins than their other operations, which would dilute any measure that relies on total operations. This can have a negative impact on stock valuation(setting aside whether it should, the point is it can). So if they have to do $1 of 10% profitable iTunes business for every $1 of 20% profitable iPod business, from the outside, you see $2 of 15% profitable business. As problems go, not a bad one to have, but some investors think it is better to split those sorts of operations off.
Steve Jobs is wrong. (There, I said it) (Score:4, Interesting)
I am in Instructional Designer and churn out a billion flash-based products a year, some of them even targeted for cell phones. Amazing how Adobe has the insight to include preset sizes and compression schemes to fit a number of different cell phones out there -- the iPhone conspicuously not one of them.
Can the iphone use it flash space as VM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Another way of saying that (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not quite "exactly what the problem is."
First, using that language implies that the iPhone is underpowered, when it'd be more true to say that Flash is a bloated resource-hog. Second, people who've researched the problem suggest that the iPhone *could* run flash, but it'd drain battery life and present other interface problems.
The major point here is that Flash just isn't an appropriate technology for mobile devices. If you want video, h264 will provide great quality/batter-consumption (relative to other video formats). I still question whether Flash is an appropriate technology for anything, but we can discuss that at another time.
Re:Another way of saying that (Score:4, Interesting)
Further more, if you're just using Flash for ads and video, you haven't even touched on the power that is Flash.
Re:Another way of saying that (Score:2, Interesting)
H264 video decoding uses relatively little power.
Flash uses lots of power.
Using Flash to watch h264 on the iPhone/iPod Touch makes no sense at all when there's already native support built-in.
Flash is a huge resource hog, like it or not, whether it's on a brand new computer or a portable device. It really needs to be optimized a lot more if Adobe expects it to be used for mobile devices, and if they/Macromedia haven't optimized it in the last 10 years they're probably not going to do it now. Focusing on adding features/more codecs/more ActionScript is only hurting its case.
I liked the dazzle and power of Shockwave and Flash a few years back when I was making web sites with them, but soon realized that nobody could bookmark individual pages, they couldn't print properly, etc. and I began moving everything to standards-compliant setups instead. I much prefer being able to use things like awstats to find out what pages are the most popular, etc. and you just can't get that kind of clarity with Flash-based sites, which are seen as one big page to a crawler or statistics package. Just a couple of examples, there are dozens of reasons why Flash is the wrong choice for any web site.
Flash is a kludge. There are ways to do everything with standards-compliant tools.
You may think that Flash can do all kinds of whizzy things, but in reality it's used mainly for advertising and watching videos.
Re:Another way of saying that (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple doesn't have much choice in terms of what you can do with the product, they usually target particular jobs and make sure it does thoes well. Why didn't apple include virtual screens until 10.5, Unix and Unix like systems had them for years? because they never were able to make it in a way that any user and deal with A little Icon Size box with little boxes isn't nearly as intuative as a full screen display of the windows properly shrunk down with anti-aliasing so they just look smaller vs. missing data, and allowed easy dragging and droping windows to different screens. Or why the current version of the iPhones doesn't have G3 because at the time it was designed the G3 Chip took to much power and sacrificed the iPhones job as a Phone and iPod (Long times of activity), While Edge is slow most locations allow a Wi-Fi to counteract that effect. People would be pissed with the iPhone if the battery bairly lasted a day.
A little OT but.. (Score:2, Interesting)