On Saturday 23 September 2006 11:20, Lee Revell wrote: > What's wrong with embedded .mpg or .wmv, other than being easy > to download (or "pirate" if you talk to the content people). > Those work on a much wider range of OSes than Flash. MPEG-1 would be unwatchable at the bandwidth Youtube uses. WMV using WMP codecs is only playable on my Linux box if I pirate some Windows code. (I'd settle for embedded MPEG-4 AVI's, though.) Flash sucks, but it is here and it's legal, even if it's not free software. Whoever said Flash was just a bunch of XML in a container like SVG was wrong, I think; that's like what Flash would have been like 10 years ago if XML had been around. Actionscript may just be Javascript, but the objects it exposes start with vectors and animation and go way off from there. SVG also has no sound support, and since this thread started by talking about sound sync problems in Flash, it's clearly not a suitable replacement as things stand now. That SMIL or whatever it was a couple years ago that was supposed to provide audio capabilities through Javascript doesn't seem to have taken off, to the point where people are even using Flash just to stream MP3's. There will be a day when all browsers will have SVG, canvas support, inbuilt access to video codecs or a standardized interface to video player plugins, audio support, some kind of synchronization framework, and a development environment that entices designers to use all those technologies together, like Flash has now. Probably it'll have a catchy acronym like Ajax to sell it as well. That day will be far enough in the future that I can't see it. In the meantime, I look forward to the eventual maturity of Gnash. Rob
