Taunting

[grauzone]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> grauzone wrote:
>> Saaa wrote:
>>> "grauzone" <none at example.net> wrote in message
>>> news:gv4p44$1jq7$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>> Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>>>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtYCFVPfx4M
>>>> How about posting a link to something everyone can play? Like an
>>>> actual video file?
>>>>
>>>> Thank you.
>>> Isn't youtube a video upload site with an inbuilt player?
>> Yes, but it requires Flash and an unholy amount of AJAX.
>> No one can be bothered with installing Flash and having a JavaScript
>> enabled browser, when something like mplayer would be enough. Especially
>> if the media player works _much_better_.
> 
> Obviously the large number of people using such sites are trying to
> prove you wrong.  :P

They just don't know it better. They probably think their PC isn't fast 
enough for fullscreen video playback and so on.

Maybe they don't even know what's making their web browsers / websites 
so slow. And what component is responsible for playing ads with SOUND.

> To be fair, the alternatives aren't much better.  Embedding a WMV or MOV
> is even more annoying, and Java's just a tremendous pain in the arse.
> 
> It'd be nice if the current efforts to standardise <video> in HTML5
> could do away with Flash video et al, but I'm not holding my breath on that.

There's no technical reason why YouTube couldn't provide a download link 
for the hidden flv/mp4 file the flash player loads. Actually, there 
_was_ one video, where YouTube provided a direct link, but that was an 
exception.

In fact, hiding the link to the actual video file seems to be some kind 
of "soft DRM". Like all almost kinds of DRM, it's breakable, but it 
requires an effort > 0. I don't want to support this.

(And for video sites like YouTube, I'm not actually missing anything.)

>>> download youtube video 
>> Can't see a download button anywhere on YouTube. Obviously, Google
>> forces users to install Flash.
> 
> Possessing a burning hatred of Flash isn't going to get everyone else to
> stop using it.  If that worked, we'd have killed off IE6 years ago.

Firefox had tremendous success as IE replacement.

If you want to go that far, Flash had success as Java replacement.

Anyway, I'm not really fond of the idea of foreign, unknown programs 
running in my web browser. If you think about it, it's ridiculous. At 
least from the security point of view.

> Either build a better system and get it installed on >90% of the world's
> PCs or learn to live with it.  :P

There are dozens of open source video players. Projects like ffmpeg 
provide good backends for audio/video decoding. And I think even the 
builtin Windows Media Player can play mp4.

>   -- Daniel