Dustup Over Flash Coming to iPhone Via QuickTime Should be Word to Apple

Lonnie Lazar ()

flvplaybackonqt.png

Are you ready to see this on your iPhone?

The Apple blogosphere percolated with spitting and popping yesterday after Daring Fireball reported that iPhone and iPod Touch users might find reasons to be excited about the impending release of QuickTime X in Snow Leopard.

The possibility of native .flv file support in QuickTime X meant that support for Flash video – probably the biggest item remaining on many people’s wish-list for iPhone – could soon be a reality for Apple’s mobile device users. The story was picked up by TechCrunch and we were off to the races.

Turns out to have been a false alarm, triggered by an over-eager post at Cateto blog, occasioned by a bit of software confusion, but still…

The point here is that with Perian, a free open source plug-in for QuickTime, Flash on the iPhone and iPod Touch would be conceivable, no matter the difficulty of Apple and Adobe executives and legal departments finding a way to get on the same page about it all.

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5 comments »

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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Posted in iPhone, iPod Touch, Media, Opinions, Rumors, Software |

  • http://www.motions.it nicola scodellaro

    I think flash video isn’t much of a problem, after all if a video provider wants to service iphone users, an investment in batch conversion is enough. The biggest issue on flash on the iphone is not video, but apps. Apple wanted (quite astutely), to keep the rules of the game in a field it can control completely. Leaving the possibility to execute flash apps on the iphone (natively or inside a browser) would be like handing over a slice of the control of the platform to adobe. This would be bad for many reasons, and not only financial ones. One of the biggest concerns Apple had about the sdk at the beginning was the performance and security (… you install a game and the phone doesn’t work anymore…), so I think – considering the somewhat mixed record of flash executables in these two areas – that flash apps on the iphone will remain imaginary for a long time.

  • http://thewillseys.us/scott/blog scott

    Making it happen isn’t a problem. The problem is that flash performance sucks. Despite what the guys on Macbreak Weekly say, browser crashes (in my case anyway) are almost always from flash running in the browser, not javascript. And flash is slow. Ever go to a web page, have everything hang a few seconds, and then something loads in flash? Yeah.

    I believe Apple when they say they haven’t put it on there yet because it’s a performance pig.

  • http://jimmerish.com theguycalledtom

    I think Safari in iPhone OS 3.0 supports HTML 5 and its video tags. Hopefully that will wipe out the need for flash:

    http://tech.yahoo.com/news/infoworld/20090616/tc_infoworld/79291

    I’ve actually been finding the iPhone web a better experience than a normal computer’s web because of the lack of flash. Everything is just cleaner and simpler to access information.

  • Budd

    More importantly, is that really a screen shot from the Club Nokia Prince gig in LA! I was there for all 3 shows and have the show’s in audio bootleg, but not video – please reveal the source!! Oh, and playing flv files in quicktime would be lovely on my iPhone!

  • Church of Apple

    Um, f— flash.
    =\