Coming Soon From Adobe: Flash Video To Your iPad

John Brownlee (6:18 am PDT, Apr 15 2011)

It’s the brand of Adobe’s shame: “Flash Player Required.” Almost four years after the iOS platform took the world by storm, Adobe still hasn’t been able to get Flash Player on Apple’s platform, and while their arguments that Apple was just being unreasonable might have held some weight a couple of years ago, the failure of even modern Android systems to deliver decent Flash performance is very much a testament to the correctness of Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash.

It looks like Adobe’s finally ready to give up the fight, at least in part. Adobe has just announced a new method in which Flash video content can be streamed to iOS using HTML5.

Adobe is now supporting HHTP Live Streaming, or HLS, on the Adobe Flash Platform. This support will allow video streaming on any platform where Flash is not installed, provided that the browser is up to HTML5 spec. Best of all, it’s invisible to end users: an embedded Flash video viewed in Chrome on the desktop might serve up Flash Player, while that same page accessed with an iPad would stream the video using 4F4 over HTTP.

If Adobe can get Flash to automatically stream HTML5 video if Flash Player isn’t available, that will make 95% of the Flash content users actually want to watch on their iPads accessible under iOS. The other 5% — Flash webgames and advertisements — we can probably all live without.

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14 comments »

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Ashley-Joseph/508975652 Ashley Joseph

    I hope this happens very soon….not that I’m in a rush.

    • Mister Bitters

      Given that it’s taken 4 years for them to come around, neither is Adobe!

      • JayeDee369

        Yeah, I agree with Bitters, if Adobe had been smart they would now be sitting pretty good in the mobile industry. Now they look like a scowled dog with it’s tail between it’s legs. Come on people, in the end it’s all about getting money and if your pride or ego is too big to make a little money…well let me know how that works out for ya!

  • Anonymous

    This is pretty much a hack, isn’t it?

    • http://www.hammyhavoc.com Hammy Havoc

      No, this Adobe removing it’s proprietary wrapper.

    • http://www.hammyhavoc.com Hammy Havoc

      No, this Adobe removing it’s proprietary wrapper.

  • http://twitter.com/davester13 D R

    This is just spin by Adobe. By saying they are converting Flash video to work with iOS devices, they are:
    1) careful not to mention they are using standard html5 video streaming formats and methods
    2) careful not to mention this ‘conversion’ involves removing the Flash wrapper around the standard h.264 video data

    This is similar to what they say about Flash support on mobile devices. They claim that all you need to access all Flash content on the internet is to have the Flash plugin on your mobile device.
    What they don’t mention:
    -ALL Flash content has to be rewritten to support touch and the small screen size of mobile devices vs desktop browsers. As reports for the Playbook confirm, when Flash on it wasn’t crashing, they couldn’t find much non-video content that worked properly on a small touch device
    -ALL Flash video content has to be re-encoded to be able to be shown without breaking up or dropping frames on mobile devices [because they don't have the CPU to decode it, and hardware video decodes only support very specific subsets of specific video formats]

    • http://www.hammyhavoc.com Hammy Havoc

      Got it in one.

  • http://twitter.com/flashfreaker flashfreaker

    I presume this technology will work very much like existing solutions do (this technology is not new, and notably, Wowza Media Server has had this capability for some time already). You still have your H.264 encoded content being streaming live or on demand–live will not be a requirement in this scenario, at least it isn’t with Wowza. The H.264 content is then automatically “chunked” and streamed over HTTP in the appropriate wrapper for the intended player. For iOS or Safari Mac, that will be Safari’s integrated version of QuickTime. For any other device or platform (desktop included), you’ll need Adobe Flash Player. If you want to see a demo of this type of switching, you can go to http://videorx.com/play/7G3UA. This technology also enabled _adaptive_ HTTP streaming, which is the best strategy for deployment of longer video over the Internet.

  • Alexander530

    Awesome. Skyfire has been very helpful though. With this, it would be nice that we don’t have to get out of safari to view flash contents.

  • hey its me

    I hate flash :-(

  • Tim4umd

    I have seen Android play flash fine. Why all the lies to Apple lovers?

  • Tim4umd

    I have seen Android play flash fine. Why all the lies to Apple lovers?

    • http://www.hammyhavoc.com Hammy Havoc

      It is battery and bandwidth intensive, not to mention most Flash websites contain very little content and are just bloated SFX. Flash is outdated and I certainly don’t want to use it on my iPhone or iPad or any system for that matter. When I find myself on a Flash website on my MacBook I’ll actually click ‘back’ because I don’t want to deal with the tedium.

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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