HTML5 flash video

Visit:

• http://www.skyfire.com/ (Skyfire mobile browser homepage)

What I felt is just not appropriate of the Skyfire technology which converts flash videos to html5 videos is because, you have to convert flash to html5 videos, which needs an extra step then just having a flash player in the page. Imagine if you want to watch flash videos, you need to send it to their cloud servers somewhere to convert the video you wanted and then send it back to you. It's such a long route and it takes much much longer then a native flash player built-in.

Since Apple doesn't allow Adobe Flash player, why not create a plugin that would replace the flash codes to a Smokescreen player call which would use Javascript and HTML 5 to become a flash video player ? Or maybe, the page should run their flash videos with a backup Smokescreen player in the event no Adobe Flash player is detected. Since Smokescreen is HTML 5 and Javascript, it should theoretically work well with HTML5 enabled players like Apple's Safari.

Why not take a shorter route than a longer route ?

Flashless Flash

We have all heard about Smokescreen which is a JavaScript/HTML 5 library that runs Flash videos without having a Flash player.

we have long known of the bad performance of Adobe Flash in Linux and Mac platforms and the troubles are never ending with Adobe doing a bad job with Flash. Just a note, whenever I have Youtube running Flash, my browsers (I am using Ubuntu 10.04) just crash. Regardless is it Firefox, Opera or Chrome... it took a dive and died.

It would be an interesting idea to implement a kind of method or plugin that would intercept demands to run Flash and swap it with Smokescreen (maybe by using the browser to internally edit it's downloaded HTML codes abit) and run Flash on Smokescreen. 

Although Smokescreen is still not really ready yet, it would be an interesting test implementation to behold.

Maybe Mozilla could donate a couple of developers to focus on helping those guys developing Smokescreen and greatly boost it's development process and quality ?