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Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

When the iPad came out and didn't have Flash support people thought Apple was nuts and that it would eventually have to change for the device to take off.

I'm not sure if that is the case, but I do know that based on the "Thoughts on Flash" comments by Jobs, Flash doesn't seem to be coming to the Apple Mobile platform ever.

Jobs really went to town on Adobe. I'm interested to see if they say anything in response.

Thoughts on Flash - Steve Jobs - April 2010
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Posted: Apr 29 2010 03:52 pm

I will very likely get an iPad and to me Flash is not all that necessary. I have a laptop that can do Flash if I need. Another interesting story is that the Android OS will feature native Flash support in the 2.2 version.

Posted: Apr 29 2010 04:10 pm

Okay so I'm a little confused here...so the iPad doesn't support flash. Okay. But doesn't YouTube run on Flash? Does this mean you can't watch YouTube videos on an iPad??

EDIT: I note that Jobs says the iPad can, in fact, view YouTube, but I'm not understanding his explanation for how that's possible. Does it somehow change the video format?

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

SoldierHawk wrote:

Okay so I'm a little confused here...so the iPad doesn't support flash. Okay. But doesn't YouTube run on Flash? Does this mean you can't watch YouTube videos on an iPad??

EDIT: I note that Jobs says the iPad can, in fact, view YouTube, but I'm not understanding his explanation for how that's possible. Does it somehow change the video format?

In order to present video to ALL standard web browsers YouTube by default offers their videos in Flash format. Most Webkit based browsers do not need flash because they can view h.264 video. Google is happy to offer this as an alternative to flash because Chrome is also built on Webkit. Long term, YouTube will most likely not need to use Flash for cross platform video because more browsers will support video as a part of HTML.

The current holdup is that h.264 video is licensed. Firefox/Mozilla won't agree to it as the standard because it isn't open.

This is the part I don't understand from Steve Jobs. He goes on and on about Adobe not being open, but then chooses a video format to go with that isn't open.

I'm not sure if you followed that Hawk.

The simple version is, YouTube offers multiple video streams and your browser picks the one that makes sense. If you have Flash it is the first choice. If you don't, you get h.264 and that works on some browsers (including the one in the iPhone).

Posted: Apr 29 2010 04:56 pm

No, that made total sense GP. And this:

GPFontaine wrote:

The simple version is, YouTube offers multiple video streams and your browser picks the one that makes sense. If you have Flash it is the first choice. If you don't, you get h.264 and that works on some browsers (including the one in the iPhone).

answered my question perfectly. Thank you.

Posted: Apr 29 2010 09:31 pm

I think Apple and Steve Jobs more directly are trying to force the issue of new internet "protocol" or whatever flash is. They're trying to force technologies' hand, I think.