Kan Apple sänka Flash med hjälp av iPhone?

What MPEG-LA announced is that their current moratorium on charging fees for the transmission of H.264 content, previously extended through 2015 for uses that don’t charge users, is now permanent. You still have to pay for a license for H.264 if you want to make things that create it, consume it, or your business model for distributing it is direct rather than indirect.

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Unfortunately, H.264 is no more suitable as a foundational technology for the open web than it was last year. Perhaps it will become such in the future — Mozilla would very much welcome a real royalty-free promise for H.264 — but only the MPEG-LA can make that happen.

Here’s how I see this battle between Apple and Adobe. For Adobe, losing would be a large-scale abandonment of Flash by web producers — sites that previously used Flash abandoning it, and new sites never using it in the first place. For Apple, losing would be if the absence of Flash on iOS devices led to people choosing competing devices that do support Flash — i.e. if the absence of Flash for iOS hurt sales of iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.

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Before the iPhone, Flash’s advantage was that it was installed on every major web-browsing computer by default. Now, there is a major web browsing OS where Flash is not supported at all. There is no alternative with market share that approaches Flash, though — that’s why we’re seeing HTML5 video as an alternative to, rather than a replacement for, Flash. If Adobe loses this battle, Flash’s decline is going to be long and slow.

Consider: is there more pressure on Apple to add Flash support to iOS, or on websites with Flash-only content to produce iOS-compatible alternatives? Such pressure — both on Apple and website publishers — is best measured not by complaints on the web, but by sales of iPhones, iPods, and iPads. The more they sell, the less likely Apple is to cave on Flash support, and the more likely it is for websites to stop publishing Flash-only content.

Biolab Disaster was completely build for HTML5 – that is, JavaScript and the new Canvas and Audio elements. It doesn't need any Plugins, just a good browser.

Biolab Disaster formulates the playable truth that it makes sense to create games for HTML5. Not only is the result on par with current Flash games, but also is the development process incredibly smooth and satisfying. The hurdles that a new technology such as HTML5 sets, were already overcome by the game engine. For the development of the game itself, I didn’t have to deal with any browser or platform issues at all.

With Microsoft delivering some HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 and JavaScript and rendering performance steadily increasing, I can’t see any reason why JavaScript and Canvas would not be the gaming platform of the coming years that finally removes Flash from its quasi monopole.

Fortune reports on a blog post by Adobe’s John Nack which appears to show that Flash is faster and much more efficient than HTML on mobile phones. These statements are conclusions based on a benchmark test by web developer, Chris Black. He tested HTML 5 running the same animation on an iPod touch 4 (same for iPhone 4), and a Nexus One, but also ran it in pure Flash on the Nexus one.

Not So Fast on That Demo Purporting to Show That Flash Player Is Faster Than HTML5 Canvas on Mobile Devices

Ends up the “HTML5” test was really, really poorly coded. Here’s a version that gets 45 FPS on my iPhone 4. Pays to be skeptical of any claim that Flash Player works well on mobile devices.

UPDATE: Here’s another tweaked version of the canvas demo, this one from Charles Ying, that updates the FPS counter less frequently (to match the Flash version), which performs even better.

Are you surprised? Don't be. As I've written many times, Adobe lives or dies by its ability to help customers solve real problems. That means putting pragmatism ahead of ideology.

Flash is great for a lot of things, and this week's demos showed it's only improving. It's not the only game in town, however, and Adobe makes its money selling tools, not giving away players. Let's help people target whatever media they need, as efficiently as possible.

In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open standard. That is to say, it was a standard designed by a range of domain experts from across the industry, working to the remit of a standards organization. In fact, two standards organizations were involved: ISO and ITU. The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations, and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs. H.264 is unambiguously open.

In contrast, neither WebM's VP8 nor Theora were assembled by a standards body such as ISO. VP8 was developed independently and entirely in secret by the company On2, prior to the company's purchase last year by Google. Theora was created by a group of open-source developers based on early work also done by On2. Though Theora's development can be described as an open, community process (albeit different in nature and style to the more formal processes and procedures used by the standards bodies), no such claim can be made of VP8. At the time of its development, VP8 was a commercial product, licensed by On2. Keeping the specifics of its codec secret was a deliberate goal of the company. Though it has since been published and to some extent documented, the major design work and decision-making was done behind closed doors, making it at its heart quite proprietary.

Google is now building a community around WebM (similar to that around Theora), but it hasn't taken any steps to submit WebM to ISO, ITU, or SMPTE for formal open standardization. The company is preferring to keep it under its own sole control.

For Google to claim that it is moving to "open codecs" is quite absurd: H.264 is very much an open codec. WebM is not.