Honestly, I'd rather see browsers (and other software) support video natively. (The same way that, for example, PNG's are supported natively and do NOT require a plug-in to be viewed.) And have it so all you need is to use a <video> element to embed videos... like the how HTML <img> element embeds images. (SMIL already has a <video> element.)
I like Flash. (And I really don't want to get into a heated debate but,....) (Although alot of people can....) Not everyone can view Flash. And (more importantly) Flash isn't an "open format" (like HTML, XML, PNG, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, etc) that everyone has the freedom to implement and do whatever they want with.
Flash is a proprietary format owned by Adobe/Macromedia. And Adobe/Macromedia restricts what can and can't be done with their free/gratis Flash player. Not to mention Adobe/Macromedia seems to be the only ones allowed to create server side software for Flash... for example, the RTMP protocol is completely closed and proprietary... and it's yet to be seen if Adobe/Macromedia would invoke the DMCA against anyone who reverse engineered it.
But having said all that, I do think it is acceptable to have Flash as one of many different options of watching a vlog. But it should NOT be the only one. You have to have a way for completely Free access to vlogs and Internet TV. (There should NOT be a "tax" on vlogs and Internet TV.)
Please, refer to this for something related: http://maketelevision.com/log/why_ogg_theora_matters_for_internet_tv
See ya
On 4/21/06, John Dowdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[ FYI: This thread was started as a response to another conversation, in
the "What's The Perfect Vlogging Software?" thread. This means that the
new topic will be invisible to those whose emailer follows threading
conventions, and made the archive misthreaded too:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/message/39116
Hitting "New" for new conversations and pasting in the Yahoo Groups
mailing address is cleaner than hitting "Reply" to start a new
discussion, thanks in advance. ]
Nathan Miller asked for help in understanding this incoming message::
>> Hey Nathan, do you realise you've got ActiveX employed
>> on your Web site? It's causing these really annoying
>> pop-up messages to appear in my browser every time I
>> access your page. I use IE 6. Can you do something
>> about this?
Not knowing the literal alert the person saw makes it hard for any of us
to be definitive.
If this person is using Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, then
they are by definition using ActiveX Controls to render some of their
content.
I visited your site in Firefox/WinXP, and also saw alerts. I have an
older version of QuickTime installed, but did not have the codecs
necessary to view that QT content. Here's what's going on:
When someone visits your video page in a plugin-using browser (Mozilla,
Safari, Opera, others) then the server identifies the media type of this
extended content via the MIME type abbreviations. The browser then
checks which plugins it has that can display this video type, invokes
the plugin, and displays the content. In Microsoft's Window browser, the
OBJECT tag identifies the ActiveX Control which the designer wants to
use (via the CLSID), and identifies any minimum version (via the
CODEBASE argument).
In both cases, the browser will throw up an alert if the plugin or
control is not installed. IE/Win will also do a version check, and will
also do a background-download of the necessary Control. Some plugins
(such as QuickTime, I believe) will also throw up their own alert if the
renderer is too old to render more modern content.
Bottom line: If your visitor's browser cannot yet render your content,
they will see an alert, and the browser will try to guide them to an
updated browser extension, in either Netscape Plugin or ActiveX wrapper.
What to do? This person will be seeing lots of similar alerts in
IE/Win... it's not solely your responsibility. Your *site* doesn't use
ActiveX so much as his *browser* uses ActiveX, and your site tries to
accommodate their choice.
How to minimize? This is self-serving of me, admitted, but it's easiest
to use video in the Adobe Flash video architecture. More people have
this browser extension than any other, and more people have the current
version than have the current versions of any other WWW technology.
This will not eliminate all browser-incapability alerts, but will reduce
them greatly... in its first three months over 50% of consumers tested
had already updated to Flash Player 8, so the odds are much better that
your audience will not see any update alerts.
Sorry I took so long, but I hope the above background helps figure out
what they're objecting to. (And like other folks in this thread, I don't
see any connection to the "Eolas" behavior change in IE/Win... only
commonality seems to be the word "ActiveX" in the title.)
jd
--
John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
Weblog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd
Aggregator: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna
Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/
Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks.
--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
charles @ reptile.ca
supercanadian @ gmail.com
developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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