Now this is interesting. Apparently, the new version of Apple’s video playing software, QuickTime X, will support the playback of .flv files in Snow Leopard. Yes, Adobe Flash files. [Update Below: Nope.]
The blog, Cateto blog dug up this seemingly small detail that was overlooked during all the other Snow Leopard WWDC announcements. But it’s anything but a small detail. Because if it’s true, that means that this same functionality could very well make it to the iPhone and iPod touch, as Cateto points out.
Unfortunately, Cateto doesn’t offer any further detail about how he found out about this .flv support. He simply states is as a fact (I’m going to presume he’s being playing with the developer builds), offers a screenshot, and goes into some detail about how it will work on Snow Leopard. Apparently, after taking a little bit of time to load (depending on the size of the file), the Flash video files will start playing in QuickTime without any conversion needed. And if you want to convert the file to something like H.264 (the video compression format Apple loves to use), you can do that too.
So while this is by no means a surefire proof of Flash video support coming to the iPhone or iPod touch (as many commenters are noting, the .flv support doesn’t necessarily mean QuickTime would be a Flash player, it could simply play those files if you can get them from somewhere), it is pretty interesting. Apple has so far resisted allowing Flash videos to play on its device because it claims Adobe’s Flash Player offers poor performance on the mobile side of things. Perhaps Apple has taken a backdoor way to add a certain level of support for Flash video.
Apple’s current page for QuickTime X doesn’t mention .flv file support, but it’s a skeleton outline of the software right now.
UPDATE: As many of the commenters have pointed out, and the Cateto blog has just confirmed, it looks like he simply had the QuickTime add-on Perian installed without realizing it. Sorry for the confusion. It looks like Flash will remain on the iPhone wish list for some time.
[via Daring Fireball]
I really hope that Apple adds Flash support. I want Flash on my iPod Touch.
quicktime is annoying. Noone needs this lame proprietary bs except apple fanboys
Unless you’re one of the many millions of iPhone users out there, who don’t get a choice.
You clearly have no idea of what your talking about Quicktime encapsulates many codec, most of them open source. Apple has been one the single largest pushers of H264 out there.
Most trolls have no clue what they’re talking about. They cling to old myths, they stereotype, they don’t capitalize their sentences…
His point is why do you need Quicktime for video and iTunes for music, surely Apple could just have a combined player like everyone else.
It might be filled with codecs but it doesn’t come with all codecs loaded which is why smart mac users use VLC.
There’s a difference between “QuickTime” (the framework), and QuickTime Player. When it comes to media playback, iTunes or QuickTime Player both do an equally good job. They are both using the underlying QuickTime framework.
VLC is a great player, but it’s constructed with a different goal, very broad support of codecs. And it streams content, which is why it can play incomplete files that QuickTime Player chokes on.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t FLV files just videos, not actual flash objects? Wouldn’t quicktime just be able to play videos embedded in flash, not actual applications such as games?
You’re exactly right. Adding .FLV support to QuickTime does NOT mean that Flash is now playable inside QuickTime … it simply means that QuickTime can now render videos encoded as .FLV. The interactivity of a ‘normal’ Flash movie requires the presence of the Flash Virtual Machine (ie the Flash Player) – which would not be present inside QuickTime.
Good update, thanks.
No worries.
The main reason why Flash isn’t on the iphone yet are related to the memory/processor needs of the Flash player. Flash is a hungry beast when it comes to resources and from what I understand Adobe are working on a new version of the player that is optimised for mobile devices such as the iphone but which will also retain most, if not all, of the functionality of the browser version.
Fingers crossed – I, for one, have a vested interest in seeing the Flash player deployed on the iphone. I’ve been developing a Flash-based CMS for a few years now (company is still in stealth mode) and the trend to mobile is obvious – I just wish Adobe would catch up faster!
Even though adobe’s execs have not understood this yet, they’ve already screwed their purchase of Macromedia. Flash is now attacked on two fronts: HTML5 standard, that allows video playback among many other things (and which Google and even Msft prefer to flash) and massive user migration to mobile devices, where Adobe is not welcome. They are used to building downloadable corporate bloatware, where development cycles are years, but they have failed to understand the internet thing (that was the competence of Macromedia). So while they are enjoying record-high “metrics” of 1.5 year old Flash player 10 adoption, their game is possibly over, without them realizing it.
wow – you sure said it. 99% penetration on the internet clearly means they don’t understand you 1% holdouts.
we shudder before your might.
I think you’re jumping the gun here for a number of reasons.
First, HTML5 isn’t a threat until we see wide scale implementation and adoption. Besides, Flash does plenty more than just play video.
Second, I’d be curious to see how many people using smart phones with web browsers have thrown out their laptops and desktops. No matter how sophisticated the software, the three inch screen on your cellphone just can’t provide the same user experience that a full computer display can. Maybe this will change in the future, but for the time being I wouldn’t call the growth of the mobile web a migration so much as a visitation.
I don’t think the HTML5 standard is anything that Adobe needs to worry about for at least 5 years. Do you realise how many people are still using IE6? Google uses Flash for YouTube and to deliver the video part of their video chat. MS preferring HTML5? You just made that up. Why would they be spending millions improving video support in Silverlight if they ‘prefer’ a free, open-source format that they can’t control or monopolize? Finally, of course Adobe are putting a lot of resources into building a less resource-intensive Flash Player for the mobile market (they’ve had a version of Flash running on an iPhone emulator for more than a year now), as well as competing with Silverlight on the desktop and enterprise space with Flex 4. They’re not as dumb as you think they are.
@Darren: Before you ask rhetorical questions, just imagine for a second that the person you asked actually knows better. I know most colleges/MBA programs in the US do not teach this humbler approach.
Looking at Google Analytics data of a popular (10m+ monthly uniques), but not hip web 2.0 website (that you may know about
for the last week:
Firefox 37%
Chrome 5%
rest is mainly IE.
IE breakdown:
IE6 16%
IE7 67%
IE8 16%
@SutroStyle, how patronizing. You have provided no evidence that you “know better” and substantial evidence to the contrary. It’s only logical for me to conclude that you don’t. If you would like to make this claim, please offer some facts that actually support it. These are the sort of arguments I would appreciate:
1. “massive user migration to mobile devices, where Adobe is not welcome” – Flash Lite is installed on more than a *billion* devices (such as Nokia/Symbian mobiles) and is expected to be installed on more than 1.5 billion by the end of this year. See for example: http://flashmob...tion-2008-2009/
2. MSFT prefers HTML5 video to Flash? MS uses Flash on microsoft.com (even in ads for Silverlight!). Where are the examples of HTML5 on microsoft.com? Oh, that’s rigtht – there aren’t any. Probably because IE8 doesn’t support the HTML5 video tag. Please explain how you arrived at your conclusion?
3. Your only attempt at providing support for your arguments was to provide browser stats which strongly support my argument. None of those browsers have support for the HTML5 video tag (the upcoming Chrome 3, Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 will have partial support, Safari 4 currently has some support) and a significant proportion use a browser that was released in 2001. IE (currently almost 60% of those stats combined) may never support the video tag. Yet, you use that as evidence against my argument?
Please explain again how the unsupported claims in your first post have any basis in reality and then I might consider that you “know better”.
Point is, browser statistics changes very fast: Chrome is already 5%, and non-IE browsers all have auto-updaters, so they are mostly current. They WILL get updated to HTML5 within 1 year.
Silverlight is a failure. When MSFT realizes it, their next best option is to implement HTML5 in IE9 (they will implement it anyway actually for many different reasons), since that still eats away from Flash, which they hate (thus the whole Silverlight push)
Regarding cell phones. I am looking at about 200-300 feedback emails from real users per day. I am not at liberty to debate this in detail here, but I can say that Flash Light is a joke, and it does not help them at all. They are looking for Flash, but they will get HTML5.
PS. And to add one more thing: I am not writing it with joy, since our company is heavily invested into Flash, but unfortunately we will have to rewrite a lot soon, as Flash is NOT being adopted on smart phones, that’s just an empirical fact, we cannot ignore smartphones since our users use them, and we want to maintain just one single codebase.
Of course we are not rewriting just yet, but it’s coming.
Yes, Flash Lite is crap. But HTML5 is not being adopted on smartphones either. On the desktop Flash has >98% penetration and HTML5 (with video tag support) has less than 90% (I chose this because that is about when it becomes vaguely viable to primarily develop for it) before Adobe can come up with a decent, lean version of Flash. I’m just saying that I don’t think Adobe are that stupid/incompetent.
And you are also ignoring the issue of codecs. Firefox 3.5 for example will only support Theora which is significantly inferior to h264. I don’t see content producers moving across to Theora when you can make a h264-encoded .mp4 which works right now in Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight.
I must have somehow deleted a sentence out of the middle of my first paragraph. I meant to write:
“Yes, Flash Lite is crap. But HTML5 is not being adopted on smartphones either. On the desktop Flash has >98% penetration and HTML5 (with video tag support) has less than 1%. Putting aside the very large assumption that MS is willing to kill Silverlight by adopting the HTML5 video tag, you are predicting that support for the HTML5 video tag in installed browsers will reach 90% (I chose this because that is about when it becomes vaguely viable to primarily develop for it) before Adobe can come up with a decent, lean version of Flash. I’m just saying that I don’t think Adobe are that stupid/incompetent.”
Also, from Adobe:
“HTML 5 faces many challenges,” says Dave Story, vice president of developer tools at Adobe. “The browser market remains highly fragmented, and incompatibilities between browsers reign. The HTML 5 timeline states that it will be at least a decade before the evolving HTML 5/CSS 3 efforts are finalized, and it remains to be seen what parts will be implemented consistently across all browsers. In the meantime, the Flash platform will continue to deliver a ubiquitous, consistent platform that enables ever richer, more engaging user experiences.”
http://tech.yah...infoworld/79291
orly?
flash is so much more then video playback
QuickTime X, now with extra Perian! Adobe punishment means no Flash for iPhone due to lazy programming over the years at Macromedia (…mind Paracomp)
It’s much more likely that there’s no Flash on the iPhone because that would mean that people wouldn’t have to go to the app store to download/purchase their apps.
I would love if this enabled flash on web browsing happen. with 3G this is long overdue.
Just to make it clear.
Flash player is not only for videos (.flv), but also for vector animation (.fla) which is by far more popular in the web.
swf, not fla.
Awesome research. FLV is flash video, ie you could go to Vimeo in Safari and play their video thru quicktime (if this theory is correct) but Flash on the iPhone is about viewing SWFs so that you could go to http://thefwa.com and see the most interesting sites on the web.
Um wow. This isn’t even speculation. Someone explain the difference between and FLV and an SWF to this guy.
>> “This effectively would make QuickTime a Flash player.”
That is incorrect … .flv is just flash video … so this does not make Quicktime a Flash player … if what is mentioned above is true …you would only be able to see flv encoded videos in quicktime .. and not see any other flash content … for example if you go to youtube.com the youtube video player (which is a flash application .swf) will not work .. if you get access to youtube’s flv stream then you could play that though.
yeah good stuff, i’ll update the wording on that.
which, btw, the Perian plugin has done for years….
1. The Flash video (flv) is just a MPEG derivate.
2. You can export from Flash a Quicktime MOV with the interactive capabilities of Flash8 or lower. That means the SWF is embedded as a separate Layer in the Quicktime video.
Flash on the iphone = billions of $ for lots of people. Cannot wait for this functionality for all phones.
SMACK IT
Flash on the iPhone = potentially millions of lost app store revenue for Apple.
Why bother buying an iPhone game for $1.99 when I can play a flash game online which is just as fun?
Apple probably sees no threat for allowing flash videos to play through Mobile Safari, since they allow full access to YouTube anyway.
And if Apple really wanted Flash on the iPhone, they could have easily up the specs on the new iPhone 3GS to support it.
It appears the original source of this information has come from someone with Perian installed.
On the WWDC build of Snow Leopard I can’t get .flv files to play, with Perian installed it’s a whole different ball game though.
H.264 and AAC has been supported for some time in FLV files. My guess is that apple will support FLV playback so long as the video is encoded in baseline H.264 and a supported audio codec.
There are a couple things in the writeup that will annoy video-techies (but that most people who don’t do pro video would probably miss).
.flv isn’t a compression codec–just a container (like .mov). A lot of people already use .flv’s with h.264 compression, since it does such a nice job at low bitrates.
Also, as far as I know, Adobe is currently pushing .flv to be replaced by the .f4v container (it isn’t supported in older versions of flash, so it is not widespread at this point).
It’s great that Quicktime X will be able to open the flash container, but I’d love to see Flash on smartphones (especially so my Flash dev skills don’t become worthless in the next 2 or so years!)
Am I the only one who DOESN’T want Flash crap on my iPhone? I have it on a Mac and it’s using so much CPU that it drains my batteries.
Flash needs to DIE and DIE quickly!
I have a feeling that HTML5 and tag will finally kill this damn plugin!
Just because quicktime supports FLV does not in anyway mean that the iphone is any closer to displaying flash content. FLV is one of the video formats that Flash can consume. The main flash file that is played in a browser is a swf, the swf then loads the FLV. Flash is much more then a video player, with that said the majority of Flash on the internet is for playing back video. Apple’s concern is memory comsumption and monetization. Most iphone games that are in the app store could be easily created in flash and played for free via mobile safari, Apple doesn’t want that, they wouldn’t get their cut of the app cost.
honestly, not a big deal.
what would be a big deal is if any swf could load on the apple devices.
Maybe not without thinking ahead a bit. But why would Apple add this support?
There are equally good arguments why Apple should add flash, and why it shouldn’t.
Currently, Apple is restricting iPhone users from using a lot of the interactivity that is currently available on the web, as well as breaking a lot of Flash based sites.
Do we really need Flash? It’s a nice platform to develop for because it works the same everywhere (except for a few extremely minor issues). HTML5 apparently replaces the need for a Flash plugin, but it looks like it is still a bit off down the road.
Apple would engineer Flash support if it cared about its users having full access to the web as it exists today. Of course, they went with AT&T as their carrier, so it’s obvious that the user experience isn’t Apple’s chief concern.
Grabbing the popcorn… Your comments are more entertaining than the actual post.
The reason we want flash on the iphone is not just for video playback, but rather the vast interactivity that it provides.
I don’t know, I would bet a lot of people want to watch Hulu on the iPhone.
So why not have Hulu serve-up plain video files to iPhone users instead of a Flash player? I bet it would be possible to have the server splice ads into the movies and cache the resulting video files until it’s time for the ads to be refrshed.
MG, for HULU – it is easier to simply convert their smallish library of files to H.264 (see youtube) or any other codec.
The flash player side of this is indeed the issue, made even worse because you’ve got VP.62 and H.264 inside the files, and even sorenson. Then there’s weird shit with swf’s in general demanding a FPU on the processor or a look up table.
Soon enough, you’ll see an nvidia/ion phone with a native flash interface – and the app store will filled overnight.
FYI, Flash Player supports playing back H.264 video since version 9.0.115.0
Hulu won’t convert it’s repetoire to H.264 – it’s rights agreements with the studios (and indeed the studios agreements with the millions of third party rights owners involved with making TV programmes) are to offer content as streams and make reasonable efforts to prevent people capturing those streams.
The BBC tried doing as you say for the iPhone and suffered a huge piracy issue, and everyone else in the content industries paid attention and won’t make the same mistake – and Adobe and Microsoft are both profiting nicely from bolting things in to Flash and Silverlight to make such content capture more difficult.
The same reason is why HTML5 isn’t going to take off with the big content sites either – it’s too easy to grab the file when they’ve agreed contractually not to make it available for download.
And that’s why Flash will need to come to more devices, or an HTMLx will need to come with some form of content protection built in.
Heck, after talking to it’s rights team, I’ll be fairly surprised if YouTube even switches over to HTML5.
This article is rubbish. All this proves is that Quicktime X now properly parses movie container files. Quicktime 7.x does not. It cares about the file extension.
Flash Player actually implements this properly. So today, using Quicktime 7.x you can open an H.264 encoded video file with an extension of .mp4 or even .mov that Quicktime opens and get Flash Player to play it. Quicktime on the other hand won’t play it unless the file extension is something it like. It looks to me like Apple just fixed Quicktime so it looks at the file contents vs the file extension.
So if this is true, Quicktime X will play H.264 Flash Video files but I bet no other Flash Video file format or .swf file, let alone any video container format other than MP4/3GPP
I think you’re probably right. It just means that Quicktime X can now most likely ignore the flv extension and play h264-encoded flv files. Not a big deal at all. This would only be news if Quicktime X had VP6 or Sorenson support and even then those codecs are rapidly being replaced by h264 in the Flash world.
maybe the EU will get involve and force all iphones to support flash.
I don’t think Flash or no Flash is really the problem when it comes to video. Starting with version 9.0.115.0, Flash could play h.264 mp4 natively. All you need your video embed codes to do is detect whether or not Flash is on the client and then bring up the Flash player or just point a link to the h.264 mp4 as appropriate. That’s what YouTube does, that’s what we do and that’s what any decent video publishing platform should be doing. The issue with Flash on the iPhone is all about games IMO…
lol!
as others have said: flv != swf
you guys going for a new fail record this week?
Like others have said, flv is not flash.
That said, Apple has a good reason for not supporting flash or FLV: battery life.
h264 Apple can use hardware decoding which is much more power efficient.
The big advantage of QuickTime X is that it will be easy to convert FLV files to h264 for mobile use.
THAT is what’s news here.
you have got to be kidding me..LOL
“Am I the only one who DOESN’T want Quicktime crap on my iPhone?”
corrected!
um, hello? iPhones since the first version have had parts of quicktime in them. It is what has always played the videos on it. Wake up please.
Any FLV video encoded with H.264 can simply be renamed with a .mov extension and play happily within Quicktime.
This is more a function of both Quicktime and Flash supporting H.264 rather than Quicktime supporting Flash.
I WANT FLASH ON MY IPHONE . I LIKE SWF NOT FLV .
Playing FLVs much different then playing videos via embeddable flash players. Even if sites did expose the urls to FLVs (they actively try to stop this so people can’t download movies) they still wouldn’t make any difference for sites like Hulu who stream video rather than progressive download like youtube.
Truthfully, sites that want to expose this functionality can do this now via mp4 (h.264). These files can be played in Flash and Quicktime already, and in fact you do see a few sites doing this now.
The load of features most of the time either confuse or annoying the users.
Basically Flash and Silverlight is being made redundant by HTML, Canvas and the new faster javascript engines. Existing code is the only reason to still muck about with these plugins.
The correct way to handle it would be to make a Flash/Silverlight compiler that outputs optimized HTML5/Canvas + Javascript code. Much as Google GWT does with Java code. That would work without plugins on any standard device and is invisible to Apple (if I remember this right the new Google Mail for iPhone was done in GWT).
You need to update this story. It is false. The person who had it work installed Perian and did not know Perian already (and has always) played .flv files.
He never confirmed that, did he?
Sometimes I’m really glad Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone.
http://www.flic...ell/3219506296/
Flash rarely serves any useful purpose on a desktop and even more rarely on a screen the size of a mobile browser window.
GSMA Mobile World Congress updates from months ago indicated all mobile platforms other than iPhone would have something working by 2010.
Getting all the prior Flash “applications” to show up on a mobile screen makes little sense to me. I tend to think of this as being a market resembling the hording of Atari 2600 game cartridge images for playback on emulators.
Jesus, more Techcrunch tabloid journalism.
Eye-grabbing headline with tenuous relationship to the actual story – check.
Weak grasp of the factors involved – check.
Little or no investigation of the actual claims – check.
Later turns out to be completely bogus – check.
I unsubscribed from Techcrunch a while ago, its just fucking annoying that trash like this still gets to me via techmeme.
MG, your standards are dropping further with every post.
Firstly, this is just someone with Perian installed. Quicktime has been able to play FLV files this way for many years.
Secondly, even if it were true, how on earth would being able to play an FLV file be of any help in playing the SWF files embedded into video sites? The video codecs have never been an issue – it’s the lack of Flash which means the embedded *players* cannot be viewed.
I find it a bit worrying that not only do you not have a basic technical knowledge of the subjects you’re posting about, but you don’t seem to be doing a shred of research either.
Will some of you haters of flash please just go check out http://www.gotoandlearn.com I promise you flash is for much more then flash banners.
Wow. Interesting how @ParisLemon doesn’t get that Flash ain’t happening on the iPhone, no matter how hard he looks. And for the record, there’s enough HTML5 out there on mobile devices (all of the WebKit-enabled devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, some Nokia phones) for Flash Lite to not matter so much by year-end.
I’ve written about why Flash isn’t needed or wanted on the iPhone a few times now: http://www.back...6bad22ba5627e84
The guy from Cateto has corrected the post, he had Perian installed.
Erm…. I can play .flv in QuickTime now.
Lets summarize a few things:
* Even though this is rarely covered by mainstream tech writers, not everyone that owns an iPhone wants Flash. Knowledgeable iPhone users and developers know that Flash is crap and they do NOT want it on their iPhones.
* Most tech writers seem oblivious to the fact that Apple isn’t going to allow 3rd party animation, video (Flash) or runtime environments (Flash, Java, Adobe AIR, etc.) on the iPhone. Sure, there are technical reasons, but strategically, Apple isn’t going to allow core iPhone OS functionality and usability to get fragmented by having 3rd parties play at this level. A Flash-based game will act differently from one developed using Cocoa Touch, for example. And performance won’t be as good, etc.
* Apple has already decided that it’s going to use open technologies for video, animation and graphics on the iPhone: HTML5 video support, CSS animation (works now: http://webkit.o...ss-animation-2/) and H.264 for video playback and streaming, OpenGL for 3D.
* Flash not being available on the iPhone isn’t an oversight; it’s a deliberate decision to not having some other company’s proprietary animation and runtime environment on their device, especially since it doesn’t advance things for Apple in the long term. Same thing for Java J2ME which is for lowest common denominator computing and that’s not what Apple does–at all.