Posted by J.O. Aho on 04/08/07 17:16

cwdjrxyz wrote:

> However for
> streaming by either progressive download or a dedicated streaming
> server, it seems to be little used by major video sites.

"Major" video sites don't care about other users than microsoft users.


> Many other
> formats give better results for streaming at the much lower bit rates
> often used for video on the web.

And those are more often closed source formats, that are supported on a
limited amount of platforms and looking at flash videos, they usualy aren't
much better than mpeg1 when it comes to quality.


> The recent surveys of what video on the web can be played by
> computers that I have seen indicate that flash is the most often
> playable.

I can from my own experience tell that only one of my computers can play
natively play flash and use the closed source player, but all my computers
uses the same operating system. All of them can play mpeg natively.


> Open source is of no importance for the flash viewer, since the
> flash player is free and even installed on most computers sold in
> recent years.

If I don't recall it wrong, flash isn't by default installed on a microsoft
installation, you need to download it. And still, the closed source flash
player do not support many platforms.


> Of course basic swf is used for many other things than videos.

No matter that you can use flash for other things than just video, it's poorly
supported format compared to mpeg. There are many places where active
movements away from microsoft is done and alternative architectures are used,
and there are manufacturers who pre-installs open source operating systems on
all their desktop computers (when looking at the server market, it's been like
this for a long time, but those machines are seldom used to surf the net).
Just assuming that everyone else can use flash is a bad assumption, even if
you and all your friends uses microsoft.


--

//Aho

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