JD on EP

The pro alert has always been annoying but I'd also chalk it up to poor performance on Windows. It's always felt "out of place" or hacked into the OS in my opinion.

Designers love Flash video for the simple fact that the content can be truly integrated into their design (overlays etc) rather than having to account for a "box" on the page for the video to be dropped in. Movie sites are great examples.

Complaining about the quality of video on YouTube is like complaining about the quality of free beer.

Most of the people who upload video to YouTube know nothing about video compression, not to mention about how to actually shoot good video for the Web -- that is where the true origin of quality for video begins.

I completely agree with Stacy on this. Quicktime on a Windows machine has always been more of an annoyance than a real benefit. No matter how many times I disable the QuickTime Taskbar agent that seems to do little more than inform me of upgrades, it continually reinstalls itself after each upgrade (and everytime I upgrade iTunes....thanks Apple for the taskbar clutter).

Apple and Quicktime really just got flanked here. Macromedia utilized the ubiquity of the Flash Player and slipped in a lightweight video codec allowing for a seamless experience on the web which, as Stacy says, designers absolutely love. Up until the Flash Player began supporting video, experiencing video through plugins amounted to basically the same experience as opening a URL directly in the QuickTime player.

The quality of video you can get using FLV can come pretty close to the Pro codecs of Quicktime. H.264 is amazing, but its restricted to its "box" like Leif stated. If Apple released a QT authoring tool to allow for the inclusion of Flash UI, they'd have something. But they don't.

I love Apple & I love QT, but when it comes to the web, FLV reigns.

Gotta agree with Leif here. The crappiness of videos on Youtube has nothing at all to do with Flash. It's mostly due to people who don't know better compressing the crap out of their crappy-to-begin-with videos *before* they upload them to youtube, where they are then converted to flv. I've uploaded some stuff to youtube and the quality is damn near the original.

I've seen more than my share of Quicktime video that looks like crap. Even made some of them myself I'm sure :) As everyone else has pointed out, given the current state of codecs and plugins, the biggest problem is the quality of the source video and lack of knowledge about compression.

I think overall trailers play better in Quicktime them Flash but that is just me.

OK John, some substantive criticisms.
FLV uses proprietary codecs that are well behind the state of the art, giving a bottleneck of encoding choices. MPEG4 has benefited from multiple encoding authors and playback clients. If you can adopt it in the next Flash release, great.
Flash frequently drops sync.
In particular, if I switch focus away from the browser on my mac, the video framerate drops to a crawl, then plays catch-up when I click back.
I'm not saying maintaining AV sync is easy (I've spent enough time working on it) but it is something I expect.
Scaling video on the mac also looks pixellated, and the gamma mapping is off so it often looks washed out.
As for interactivity in QT, it was nice when it could play Flash back too, but that licensing seemed to peter out a few years back.

I don't think QT is the ultimate answer either, and I don't want this to become a pissing contest over individual platforms. What I want is some open standards support.

If Flash could deliver an MPEG4 player that matches the quality of VLC or QT, that would be wonderful too.

Flash's integration of MP3 support a while back was an enormous help to audio publishers; integrating mpeg4 would be a simialr win.

Sure, Jack- I don't disagree in the least, but think that's more due to the fact that Apple produces/encodes those movie trailers specifically for display using Quicktime. The Quicktime trailers are most definitely a leading example *on the Apple site, of course* of the quality web-based QT movies can achieve, but not necessarily indicative of how third-party developers are or aren't using the technology. I think you'll probably also agree that the Flash video examples on the Adobe (and former Macromedia) site are also pretty darn well-crafted and encoded examples of FLV video, too.

Keith and Leif hit it on the head, IMHO- YouTube is mostly frequented by consumer-level video enthusiasts (not pros), who don't know a whole lot about encoding best practices or general shooting/production practices- so not really the best example of FLV at it's best to be comparing to Quicktime at it's best. ;-)

(my humble $.02, of course)

It seems to me that at the time apple created the pro version upgrade they had a shift in their goals for quicktime. They started focusing on it as a middleware format that was used in shuttling content between their pro apps and any 3rd party apps that supported it. It was the viewing technology that played the audio in itunes and let you watch trailers in itunes. It seems to me they stopped focusing on it as a browser plugin format that they would go into battle with against real and microsoft. They took a left turn and said this technology "supports" our software (pro and itunes) and hardware (ipod) integration goals. Lets focus on that. Almost like there Core frameworks in OS X. Then flash got the spark codec and suddenly video was as easy as making swf files.

As to the current quality i think that video on youtube is not about the quality but the communication and sharing. There are people out there who are happy with "good enough" rather than "ideal" video quality. Source quality does have a lot to do with it. Not everyone has hdtv capable recording, editing or sources.

I think that some work could be done in relation to high def capabilities in the flash player. His post seems to focus on the passive video experience rather than interactive multimedia experiences. This brings up the idea of how could Adobe develop a workflow for basically these straight video jobs. I'd love to see the player get the ability for a user to double click on an flv and have the flash player play it like .mov and quicktime. Maybe the player has a built in generic control set. Seems like the fullscreen beta is working towards that. Maybe adding video encoding to the apollo distribution so once an end user gets an apollo app and installs the runtime environment they also get an easy way to encode video to flv locally and view it?

Just my two cents. -e

the next worry shouldn't be quality of video but copyright protection, is adobe prepared for the possible riaa/mpaa idiocy onslaught when some moron of a lawyer thinks that google and youtube video is only possible due to flv and the downloading of it is facilitated via flash, then they try to sue adobe to modify flash player to prevent downloading etc and encrypt its content like decss...

mark cuban wrote a gootube rant today
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/10/11/gootube-the-end-of-drm/
where he talks about ripping video to ipod, but he neglects to mention what makes the piracy possible it the inherent openness of the flv player found of both google video and youtube...

So what is this quicktame thing anyway. Is it that clunky, invasive, video thing that my dad probably used back in the 90's..?
I don't see it mentioned in the 1.6billion sale of youtube. I dont think anybody is interested in this qt thing now, like 8track cassetes, betamax?

Ah right, it's that addon thing that comes with itunes and clogs the system tray with rubbish.

Mark, you're very very bad, nobody disses QuickTime around me.... ;-)

Mike raises a plausible scenario, about lawyers going after the makers of the printing press... like Willie Sutton said.... :(

"eestes1" described the usefulness of FLV for desktop play. I have zero idea of where this is in the timeline, but if it's not in the early Apollo, then that seems a good candidate for future work.

I think we're all agreed that video quality depends on the quality of the original source files, and then on how they're compressed (and possibly recompressed), and only then on local playback details.

quicktime? isn't it like 10 megs just to download it?

I appreciate that Kevin stopped in here... he came onto the QuickTime lists, as an Apple staffer, in 2000 (post-ClueTrain but pre-weblog), and really helped people out.

But let me savage your arguments anyway.... ;-)

"OK John, some substantive criticisms."

Okay, we're switching from a conclusion of "save us from crappy Flash video" to a laundry list of other points, got it.... :(

"FLV uses proprietary codecs..."

We've got two video codecs in the Adobe Flash Player 8+. They offer the most predictable and friendly playback available. The criteria did not include licensing fees for others, true... Tinic uro has info on the more important criteria.

"Flash frequently drops sync."

That's true, particularly with longer clips, particularly with the first compact codec, particularly in certain browsers. That's a true observation for some cases, but unobservable in most cases.

"In particular, if I switch focus away from the browser on my mac, the video framerate drops to a crawl, then plays catch-up when I click back."

Welcome to The Browser. You'll also note that the latency varies by browser, not only brand, but also version and OS. Firefox/Mac, in particular, was notorious for not giving plugins the CPU cycles they desired, and when windows went to background they would not send such messages to extensions. This is more noticeable with FLV, which plays in the context of other content rather than off in its own application window.

"Scaling video on the mac also looks pixellated, and the gamma mapping is off so it often looks washed out."

I have zero info myself on the spatial interpolation or color scale code. If you can make a comparative sample then that would be a great change request for the Player wishlist, thanks.

"As for interactivity in QT, it was nice when it could play Flash back too, but that licensing seemed to peter out a few years back."

It wasn't the licensing, from what I understand, but this is Apple's story to tell, not mine.

"I don't think QT is the ultimate answer either, and I don't want this to become a pissing contest over individual platforms."

Oh, dude, now I owe you a beer.... ;-)

"What I want is some open standards support. If Flash could deliver an MPEG4 player that matches the quality of VLC or QT, that would be wonderful too."

I hear you. There's big a big uptick in this request since the summer, and the explosion of consumer validation of web video via YouTube and other video sites. I am not privy to the decision processes on this, but I know that those who are are aware of this desire. Possible negative factors include distribution costs (particularly with slower consumer adoption of the entire Player), as well as increased commoditization (Adobe has a responsibility to shareholders too). I have no idea how those concerns would play out... outside my ken. If you've got the arguments, though, I'll make sure that decisionmakers see them.

I'm seeing a very different awareness start to emerge this week about video in Adobe Flash Player... the money exchanged in the YouTube deal seemed to cap a growing interest in the whole field of casual video distributed inside WWW browsers. These conversations are valuable to me, in showing how public thought is changing.

IMHO the biggest drawback to the On2 FLV codec is that it does not scale up well. At low bitrates it has very comparable (and often better) quality than QT. However, increasing bitrates does not increase quality at nearly the same rate as h.264. This makes FLV a poor choice for high quality web videos, or for installation / local video playback.

There's also a dearth of good encoding / editing tools (ex. server side, command line) for FLV.

In almost every other respect, Flash video is a clear winner.

How about the fact that installing QT on a Win machine installs crap you don't want...I installed QT, and suddenly I have a QTTray process (as an earlier poster pointed out). I also have an "iTunes Helper process" despite the fact that I never installed iTunes, and finally one marked "iPod" despite the fact I don't owbn one! None is easy to remove...you have to dig through registry entries.

At least Flash Player seems reasonably well behaved!

Go figure, people are afraid of adobe and their "proprietary" technologies. They can run scared, but the real content providers and developers know they have a company they can put their trust in. I'm not worried.

Now John, you asked for solid points; don't whinge when I give you some. [jd sez: huh?] If Macromedia can save us from crappy Flash video by making it less crappy, that's a win too. Some detailed replies:

Sync is hard. The way to do it is to be able to skip forward to a keyframe if the difference frames are behind, and to use the host audio clock as the timing source. QuickTime's clock subsystem does this and how it works is documented. Having an OS with known low latencies and explicit interrupt support for audio like OS X helps, but QT manages to keep sync on Windows too.

The Browser focus issue is handled by QT - that's what one of the helper apps on Windows is for, to allow it to have enough CPU time to keep it running. I didn't work on that code, but I know the chaps who did and it does make a big difference.

Making less mess by default, and making the extras easier to remove is part of the work Apple need to do to stop bugging people. The previous QT installer on Windows had 23 pages of options; the iTunes-bundled one takes this down to one.

For the details of scaling artefacts, pick a video on Google Video and compare the Flash version with the 'download for iPod' one. The next video I post I'll do some comparisons myself. Eestes' comment reminds me of the BBC term 'good enough for news', which is often true - when I do live webcasts and recording, I use much shoddier quality than a fully edited piece in favour of getting it up rapidly. Source quality does indeed mark a boundary, but with $300 DV cameras providing broadcast quality now, I am concerned about the playback quality constraints too.

Distribution costs in terms of licensing? I think the MPEG4 licensing cap Apple fought for should help there. In terms of making the download a bit bigger, that is a tradeoff, but I think the benefits are worth it. You have delivered on widespread adoption before, and given the size of video files, an extra unobtrusive player update is small by comparison. Handling full HD-sized H264 may be too much to bite off (Apple hedges the playback specs for those files too), but Main Profile MPEG4 is well within the 'plays on most CPUs' threshold you have adopted before.

As for commoditization, that is exactly what I want. If MPEG4 video playback can become a commodity, as MP3 audio is, the market can move on to compete on other grounds. Look how many Flash-based mp3 players there are out there.

Kevin, users are voting with their feet, they couldn't care less about scaling artifacts, audio clocks or keyframes. They just want to consume video and Flash delivers while QT falls on its nose. YouTube (and all its clones) wouldn't have happened without Flash video. It's what I call a user-centered choice of technology. A wise choice made by people who aren't obsessed by technical details. Audio needs catching up? Oh wow, big deal.

It may be a hard pill to swallow but let's face it, QT has had its day and the gap is only going to widen as Flash Video matures. Will Adobe add new codecs? Of course they will. Will it be mp4? Who knows.

One point we can agree on is that DRM can stay where it is, we don't want it here.

Then again QT ain't so bad - ever tried Real? lol

Stefan

Did you read what I wrote? Yes, QT did fall on its nose. Part of my point was that Adobe added the wrong codec - YouTube didn't use on2, they used Spark, because they could generate it with common tools. See my post on how Flash can get less crappy

So, Kevin, it sounds like you're saying "What I meant when I said 'save us from crappy Flash Video' is that Flash Video shouldn't be used because Macromedia didn't manage to install onto the world's computers the highest-quality decompression code ever created", is that the nut here?

If so, then did you read what I wrote? Tinic's article described the competing priorities which determined codec choice. It's a balance, and one interest does not outweigh all others.

Believe me, it's pretty "crappy" when you try to see a video and it opens its own branded chrome then prompts you to do a download, assuming you don't see a "missing plugin" alert before doing anything else. Flash Video is indeed improving the experience of using video on the web, can you and I agree with the rest of the world on that...?

jd

I'm not arguing for 'the highest quality decompression code' - I realise h264 is too CPU-intensive for lots of machines; I said you should have chosen mpeg4 over on2 precisely because it is commoditized and interoperates, just as mp3 does.
You chose closed over open, replicating one of Apple's older mistakes. I did agree with you on the dumb popups, right at the top of both my linked posts.