Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, was in New York City today and dropped by my office to talk about Firefox 3.5, which is now officially being rolled out as a “preview” version (a very stable beta) to everyone using the current 3.5 beta. Firefox 3.5 is supposedly much faster than earlier versions, which is always a good thing. Honestly, the nanosecond speed differences between most of today’s latest browsers is becoming hard to detect. Three features of Firefox 3.5 which stand out for me are: 1) its embrace of open-source video standards, 2) its geo-location capabilities, and 3) support for downloadable fonts and other graphic tricks.
In the video above, Beltzner demos some of the new video and graphics capabilities of Firefox 3.5. Built into the browser is a video player based on the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. The video player supports HTML5, which means that links and other interactive elements can easily be placed inside videos. The demo page Beltzner shows in the video can be found here (but the effects only work if you are looking at it in Firefox 3.5). Being able to treat the content inside videos like Web pages opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Web video. Already, DailyMotion offers all of its videos in the Ogg Theora format. If this takes off, Flash video could be come history.
Look closely at what Beltzner is showing off in the video, because you can’t do any of that with Flash.
Update: There is a lot of great debate in the comments about whether or not you can do this stuff in Flash. Technically, you can, but the only examples I’ve seen are where the entire page is done in Flash or a proprietary overlay is being used. The videos in the demo all sit within regular Web pages and are written in HTML5. What is interesting in my mind about the Ogg Vorbis format is that it makes videos programmable. Videos today are still for the most part siloed off from the rest of the Web in their Flash players as a separate experience. It is time to break down those walls.
Ogg Theora presents some difficulties.
It has much less difficulties than the proprietary H.264 codec with video quality that is just as good.
No, H.264 quality and performance are far beyond Ogg Theora. That’s why Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and more pay millions in licensing fees to MPEG-LA to be able to distribute it to consumer machines.
Please don’t say things which aren’t so. It confuses new readers unnecessarily.
jd/adobe
No, H.264 and Ogg Theora performance are near the same now. H.264 was much faster long ago…but not so any more.
Please don’t say things which aren’t so. If confuses new readers unnecessarily.
Also h.264 can be hardware accelerated ( gpu ) on most modern computers. Ogg cannot.
This is way more exciting than Google Wave.
Like what that flash doesn’t?
Adobe is already working hard with too many things like AIR, Flash etc. They dont have endless pocket to roll out “open” things like goog.
Would you mind to mention some examples?
I’m pretty sure you can do all that in Flash and Silverlight.
It’s a huge difference to be able to hack on javascript video apps within a browser window than to be able to do it using expensive proprietary systems.
Also in general it’s easier to share video related code now as it doesn’t require the above mentioned expensive systems to do so. (Piracy not withstanding)
Expensive systems? Flash – granted. But Silverlight can stream any VC1/H264 video and there’s an Eclipse stack for development.
Going to be interesting to see how many sites will adopt HTML5. And how the regular RIA platforms will respond to it.
With html5 you can embed video from a site (let’s say YouTube) and add effects to it from your own JavaScript code. You can’t do anything to the Flash video embedded from YouTube because to do that you should change the code inside their Flash script, which you can’t touch.
YouTube Flash video is like text displayed as images (the Add Comment button below the form I’m typing in) and html5 video is like the html text of the “Or add a Video Comment” below. The image is “dead” content, the link is “alive”.
That’s always been the big difference between html and Flash and it’s now extended to videos as well.
Don’t agree with this at all.
I develop Flash and Silverlight. If you develop the Flash you can provide entry points from JavaScript. Silverlight is even more flexible, with full DOM access from the JavaScript into the Silverlight island.
Exactly the reason flash/silverlight doesn’t do that. Adobe/Microsoft want to sell software for developers which is their main revenue stream.
Microsoft sells Operating Systems, MS Dynamics, and Development Tools, not frameworks or end-user distributables (most of which have free open-source alternatives such as mono, moonlight, etc).
.net is a framework. Mono is no alternative to .net, well maybe, if you want a product that is years behind in features and functionality. Linux will never be an alternative for Windows, it just can’t keep up or produce the quality needed.
Just put the video specific stuff in a js area, and then just encrypt it.
Flash and Silverlight are free.
The browser plugins are free, but the development tools are not.
Flash CS3 cost a lot, and so does Visual Studios.
For Adobe, there is of course the free Flex compiler, but it’s not very easy to work with unless you pay for Flex Builder.
And for Microsoft’s Silverlight you may be able to use a free paired down tool like Visual Studio Express Edition, but it didn’t look like it when I looked into it.
Most reasonable IDEs for development are also not free if you buy them from big companies: But the FLEX SDK is free (and open source) and there are other editors instead of Flash Builder (former Flex Builder) like “FlashDevelop” which are open source.
So its possible to write Flash without paying a cent in a reasonable workflow – pretty much the same as with most other languages.
Beside that: Its a really ignorant statement that none of this is possible with flash: Afaik a guy from japan ported the FLARToolkit ( Flash AR ) to javascript so javascript finally has a Augmented Reality implementation.
So no one would program unless the tools are free? Give me a break. Anyway Flash has been killed so many times now … yawn.
Microsoft offers Visual Web Developer Express for free, and you can use MonoDevelop to create Silverlight apps for free as well.
>> Flash CS3 cost a lot, and so does Visual Studios.
You are not seriously comparing Flash CS3 to the ability to display video in a browser, are you?
The full flash (Flex) framework is completely free and you can download it and develop any Flash/Flex app you wish.
Yes, Flash CS3 is expensive but that is like saying that Mozilla and it’s ability to display images is not free since Photoshop CS4 is expensive.
Not for editing.
Flash as a standard may be free, but as a container it can only hold patented formats – h264 for video and aac for video. For example, you cannot put a vorbis audio stream within a .flv container and expect the player to be able to decode it. For this reason, flash as implemented will never be Free (as in speech).
There isn’t anything shown there that cannot be done in flash. Furthermore, there are free flash IDEs available, SE|PY, Flashdevelop, etc., so the “expensive proprietary systems” really doesn’t stand on it’s own anymore.
Well, I am no expert at flash but, do you think it can interact with DOM and manipulate its objects? Flash is also one of the buggiest piece of software IMHO. Everytime you play a video on youtube cpu and memory usage spikes through the roof.
This is because the Youtube player is shit.
A good Flash programmer (which is not that common, a lot of flash programmer are in fact designer without any programming background) can do a lot shit without using more than 5% cpu…
I did a video player that takes a 10M users / day, and never got a single complain about it, the only CPU it uses is for video decoding, and we stream higher quality that most of Youtube content.
Stop blamming Flash for stuff that fall into people incompetence.
Hakushi > what’s your website’s URL with its magical video player that delivers hi-quality video stream with super low CPU consumption ?
What about vimeo.com? I’ve never had any troubles with that player.
A good example of links in lash would be the handy banner overlays in an flv player. People kill me with the flash hate…
this is brilliant!
Someone has to say it:
Oh the things the porn industry will do with this…
LOL. I was thinking more like…”Oh the things the ad industry will do with this…”. You beat me.
it’s really great… but you can do that with flash too, actually.
Videos in Flash are fully accessible through its scripting language actionscript, which can be called from javascript also. So it can be deformed, filtered, rotated, etc on the fly.
You could also change the controls UI on the fly, play multiple videos together, and interact with them in any way you want…
Voila, just FYI.
ps: I am not taking sides here, I think html5 looks really great, but I wanted to point out that Flash can do that too.
Maybe I should have asked, Why don’t we see this in Flash? Because even if it is possible, nobody does it.
Microsoft ASF Format allowed something more-or-less equivalent back in the early 2000s. It was actually used a fair bit when it first came out to create “interactive” video-based multimedia. I remember seeing some cool educational stuff, but (imho) most uses of it turned out to be really annoying.
I think the deal was that I was conditioned to view videos as a passive thing (TV). It seemed like I was being forced to interact with them or having them try to interact with me when all I wanted to do was just watch. Consequently, I (and apparently most other people) learned to avoid ASF format videos and the format faded away…
But perhaps it was just too early at that time. I suspect that, viewed today, those interactions would be no more annoying than the general character of YouTube and obviously the YouTube model is considered successful…
> Why don’t we see this in Flash? Because even if it is possible, nobody does it.
That made no sense at all.
Erick, as an experienced Flash developer I can also say that you can do all those things with the Flash Platform and Actionscript. The reason you don’t see a lot of those things all over the web is because there really isn’t a lot of use for video object tricks. People mostly just need a resizable video player that just works. The video content should be king, not a bunch of filters and pointless stuff. Flash already got a bad rap for those things 10 years ago. So the good designers and developers refrain from overusing the stuff that is annoying.
Sadly, there are a lot of terrible quality flash video experiences on the web and youtube is one of the worst offenders. But it’s not the technology and Hulu is proof of that. Great quality video and great user experience.
I would have preferred that a little research went into this article, rather than taking what Mozilla were telling you at face value. It makes me sad that in the rush to be the first to break a particular story, old-school professional journalism is being thrown out the window. TechCrunch certainly isn’t alone in this, but that doesn’t make it right.
You asked why we don’t see any of these features being used in Flash-based video. What is shown in the embedded video above amounts to nothing more than cheap gimmicks that add nothing to the user experience. The only interesting feature is the ability to play video in the browser without the user having to have the Flash Player installed. Exactly how much that matters depends on the audience demographics for your site. Given the near-ubiquitous install base of the Flash Player, and the fact this will only be available in bleeding-edge versions of Firefox, I’m going to guess that it probably doesn’t matter all that much.
Flash has very few legitimate uses remaining, but for video playback on the web it’s the only sensible choice. I don’t see cheap gimmicks changing that anytime soon, but maybe I’m just getting old.
The point of the demo is not the visual gimmicks. It is to show that video can be programmable, just like any other part of a Web page.
Erick. At the end of the day as far as implementation, I think the major comparison is javascript vs flash/actionscript. This new format just plan ol’ makes it easier for web devs to make video on the fly without having to worry about compiling, memory, learning AS, having to install the next version of a Flash IDE.
Steve has a great point in that Flash is now only ubiquitously used for mp3 and video playback.
Great article, I hope it picks up, it makes the workflow much easier and will save the budget of a few startups so they don’t have to hire/outsource flash development/buy another expensive piece of adobe software/worry about interfacing frontend/backend media.
Because what was demonstrated were essentially ‘tech toys’? Check out some posts on the flash blog: http://theflashblog.com/ (not that I’ve checked in a few weeks; YMMV). Flash can do this and more – the question should be ‘why haven’t we been able to do this without flash’? But – big one here – flash IS a plugin – it _should_ be able to do these things. And honestly, flash versions supporting these advanced features are much more ubiquitous than HTML 5.
for instance: http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=1996
don’t get me wrong – I’d love to deploy this level of interactivity using straight javascript and markup from a text editor rather than a serveral-hundred-dollar IDE. but asking, “why can’t flash do that?” seems a bit short-sighted.
The most obvious answer is that there isn’t anything anything useful here. This whole thing looked like one big Flash toy. Also Ogg is pretty terrible in both quality and adoption, why not use any other open source project like ffmpeg or at least support MP4? H264 is an open standard. Most major video sites encode to that already, who would reencode an entire video library to support this?
“who would reencode an entire video library to support this?” DailyMotion, for starters.
h264 is not an open standard, it is heavily patented, and soon may not even be free-as-in-beer.
A better format to use may be dirac ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec) ) which recently reached 1.0 release.
The LiVES team plans to start looking into this later this year.
Salsaman — http://lives.sourceforge.net
IMHO, the reason we dont see it in flash is because users dont care for it. video with links and annotations has been a bomb on youtube.
Why would you ever want to desaturate, find points, or colorize a video? I can’t think of a single use case for any of those things he showed except for skinning the player and detecting things with javascript. This was just a show.
Also, it only works for Ogg video, which is not used on any other browser. It’s a waste of time to be building these tools at FireFox. They should work on their terrible font rendering.
that’s the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard anybody say that obviously doesn’t pay any attention, if your a webmaster you can now easily edit video content for your sites through the browser. I’ve been wanting something like this for ages, now i don’t have to spend loads of money on video editing software. For the casual user i think this is perfect.
I woudln’t call any applying filters to video “Editing”. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Could be that it’s not actually a good idea.
Because there is no real use for it.
There are plenty of proof of concept type things out there doing stuff like this, and more, with flash video.
Even going so far as to use webcams to do those type of things with live video.
It’s just that there is no real world application that I can see that would actually benefit from it.
Just cause it can be done, doesn’t mean it should, or that it would be useful if it were.
As many have already said, you can very much do this stuff in Flash, but you have to have a good use for it.
One neat application I’ve been working on lately is unwrapping 360 degree videos in real time. (Think Google Street View, but with video).
I have a couple prototypes posted.
Here’s one in a YouTube-style player:
– http://360video.com/viewer.swf?tourGroupLink=dinoBattle.xml
This one let’s you see what the transformation is doing to the source video:
– http://360video.com/flashcamp
Flash is a fantastic prototyping tool. Even when you can do stuff in the browser, it’s often easier/more straightforward in Flash. (It has a great standard library and avoids most cross-browser headaches).
I’m sure it’s great (it sounds great), but when I click on it I get
“This demo was created using the 0-360 Panoramic Optic™ and Flash CS4 with Pixel Bender. It requires Flash Player 10. There’s a longer, higher resolution video available here.”
Because I don’t have the correct version of flash installed.
The main boon for me is that now you can play video straight from the browser. No plugins, it has a chance to become a defacto standard.
So yes, it can also do fancy tricks but thats probably just going to lead to an early adopter rash of late 90s style webpages, dancing hamsters and all.
I think its a really really good thing to have an open source standard built in to the browser. Here’s hoping it gets the market share it need.s
Yeah, but it is different. Since this is built using javascript anyone with little knowledge of javascript and greasemonkey can add their own controls. On the other hand; developers have to buy proprietary IDEs to do this using flash. And, the end users don’t have much control on how flash player behaves.
Depends on how you built your flash. You could easily create a stylesheet for your skin, or open up your api for javascript access via the ExternalInterface.
Not to mention that you don’t need proprietary IDEs to build flash applications.
See http://haxe.org
I agree that scaling, rotating, clipping , … on a video aren’t the most wanted features. But to me it seems the main difference is that javascript can both interact with the webpage and the video. When you embed a flashvideo in a webpage, there isn’t a connection between the video and the webpage.
The developer in the video talks about changing the backgroundcolor of the page depending on the colors of the video.
I can be wrong, but I don’t think this kind of interaction is possible with flash.
Yes, you can be wrong, and yes, you are, and yes, this kind of interaction is possible with Flash. And no, it doesn’t cost a single dime to develop in Flash you don’t need an expensive IDE as so many people seem to think.
This is grea. Imagine with icecast you can now start your own ogg theirs stream. It’s now easy torun your own tv channel. Without any software needs by the end user.
that is pretty awesome.
This is amazing! Taking web video and flash to a new level. Creating a surge of creating through video and rich web content.
Great stuff…
“and flash”
How about you READ the article or WATCH the video????
lame flash engineer: “The DOM what’s that? hey frank you think we should support this?”
lame flash engineer2:”No joe lets not support standards why would we ever need to support that”
common sense engineer:”you guys are idiots i’m going to work for google”
common sense engineer: “wow, we can do this in the DOM!”
common sense engineer2: “nobody’s ever done this!”
any tech artist: “Yeah, but does it have SEO? It’s GOTTA have SEO. It’s nothing without SEO.” *wink*
So awesome!! I’m getting stoked for HTML5
Erick, Safari 4 shows this page as well, with video.
sorry, please ignore. I thought of another video…
I still wait to have the capability to download videos that you see, and not to have to add a compoment for that…
This feature allows downloading.
If you go to a page with a video in HTML5, http://tinyvid.tv/show/1odneot3p3d2a for example, and you press the right button over the video, one of the options in the contextual menu allows you to save the video without anything else than the browser itself.
I’m still waiting for the capability to download the videos that you see and not to have to add an extra component
Didn’t Apple announce that Safari 4 supports HTML 5 video? Is that different from what Firefox 3.5 is showing now?
The main difference is that Apple supports MOV videos.
The codec hell is haunting HTML5.
But, Mozilla starts with OGG support and will continue adding other formats. Let’s wait.
According to the headline, you’re comparing Firefox (a browser) to Flash (a multimedia technology), and videos (a type of media) to web pages (a format for displaying such media). Huh?
I got it when I saw the video.
This is pretty awesome. I enjoy what Firefox is doing. It’s really going to go well once video gets better and better. Thanks for sharing.
Here’s an example of the same sort of thing done in Flash from back in 2007.
http://www.rga.com/holiday07/
Boy, that took a long time to load. And the whole page is Flash.
Yeah and if it was written for the latest Flash player, it would roar with speed. Point taken that Flash WAS slow. Get over it.
Doesn’t even support unicode characters! HTML5 would do that I assume.
http://localhostr.com/files/151752/Picture+1.png
Real journalists reports facts and leave their bias at the door.
Why doesn’t anyone talk about firefox 3 incompatibility with many web sites? Every day I’m switching to safari to get around a non-functional page on firefox. I don’t care if the website didn’t follow some standard exactly. I just want it to work. Firefox has become the mac of browsers – many people won’t say a bad word. Even with obvious problems.
I’m sorry I ever upgraded from v 2.
> I don’t care if the website didn’t follow some standard exactly. I just want it to work.
When things display badly because the code don’t follow web standards the problem lies in the code not in the browser! From a developer point of view, I think among all browsers the one the gives more headaches is certainly NOT FireFox!!!
Every page I use is perfect in Firefox.
I don’t know which sites do you use normally, but I don’t think that Firefox is an incompatible browser.
I love to site that stuff being actually implemented! Firefox for the win! Btw: It’s Firefox, not FireFox
// Twitter: @projectlog
Next generation of browsers will definitely change the face of web apps – one can only hope that the majority of the windows user base will not hang on to ‘obsolete’ browsers for too long.
i cant wait for this. good night flash
There are still a whole bunch of problems that need to be overcome with this spec, but overall I’m personally really excited about it.
Sure Flash can do most of these things, but it still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of me having to jump between different tools and different frameworks to accomplish something that can easily be accomplished within the browser. After all, thats why JS is so big now. Otherwise you can just have a whole bunch of crappy Flash object controlling all the dynamic parts of your site (i.e. scrolling carousels and drop down menus).
I still can’t watch flash movies in firefox without them skipping on my unibody mac. That’s the one thing I have to consistently jump to safari to be able to do.
Maybe it’s just me?
at the very least this will make adobe improve flash
Ah, the power of HTML5! It’s also in Webkit so it’s in iPhone 3.0 software as well.
The only issue is that MS and IE team are still way, way behind on all this and their browser is still the one with largest marketshare. So unless MS ads it, we’ll be stuck with Adobe shit.
I’m thinking that about 1/4 to 1/3 of the world uses non-Micro$oft browsers, and that’s a lot of people to ignore when we live in a competitive world. Simply put, users are finding more and more reasons to move away from IE — its only because it comes with the OS some people use it.
Adobe will improve flash in ‘retaliation’, and when you start looking at java script having the capabilities to run as quick as native (OS) code, Adobe (if they’re smart) should follow suit.
Video is now FREE to embed, and flash like content can now be made (and ran QUICKLY), which is also free.
I’m just thinking how many will take advantage of this for advertising, and how many will wonder how their content will be indexed by the G.
ahaa.. So, finally we are getting some non-twitter news…
…keep it up guys with all the info…
Flash ‘can’ do that, but probably not nearly as easily as html5. Since html5 has video playback included it really allows you to go wild. Eventually, as html5 becomes standard across all browsers, flash will no longer be needed. I give flash a lifespan of about 3-4 years before it’s obsolete.
Of course, a lot depends on Microsoft here. If they decide to lag like they do always, then flash can have some legs. If they decide to join the other modern browsers, and have a html5 browser ready for windows 7 then its over for flash.
spoken like someone who uses Flashblock to block ads, so they have no idea of what real artists are doing (and it ain’t Silverlight).
Check thefwa.com . People are doing anything and everything possible with Flash and video and beyond.
I tried downloading Firefox 3.5 but I keep getting errors and the download never finishes.
Try it from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
And scan you PC for viruses or spyware.