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Darkabomination wrote:

Unfortunately I can't use flash at all. Any site I've tried instantly crashes and won't let me do it, even though I've tried a ton of ways to optimize flash. It's really frustrating I can't watch Sailor Moon Crystal on Hulu.

There is a way you could view it on CR, and without using Flash:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cr-hls-player/aeajdeepnjjdekpbicjhfldagkjndjid
(This is a Chrome extension that unofficially uses the HLS stream intended for devices).

I don't know why, but HTML5 players fall apart in fullscreen for me. The video becomes extremely choppy and unwatchable. I looked online, but I couldn't get any of the supposed fixes to work. I'm stuck with Flash until I do a format/reinstall in the hopes that fixes whatever is wrong.

I remember back in the early 2000's when computer geeks were all singing "flash a-ah savior of the universe" now there all singing "flash a-ah destroyer of the Internet" Laughing

I did'nt even know that Crunchy has support for *.ASS Subs oO

(hopefully .ass will also replace the shitty .srt subs anytime in the future.)

btw.. It's a bit OT, but is there any Android Video Player App Availiable that also supports .ass?

TheAncientOne wrote:

Darkabomination wrote:

...

There is a way you could view it on CR, and without using Flash:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cr-hls-player/aeajdeepnjjdekpbicjhfldagkjndjid
(This is a Chrome extension that unofficially uses the HLS stream intended for devices).

At first glance seems like a solution, and the reviews are generally positive, but... I'm a bit iffy about this part;

Quote:

You will have to put in your username and password, either on the options page or when it prompts you when trying to watch a video. ...

If not for this, I'd recommend it to others on the CR forums when they're complaining about Flash. (And, well, second reason I don't, being this might skirt their TOS...)

Even if it's safe and that data isn't compromised and stays on the local machine at now, being a third party app how well can we trust the developer end not getting compromised later at some point and affecting the app somehow?...

Blanchimont wrote:

At first glance seems like a solution, and the reviews are generally positive, but... I'm a bit iffy about this part;

Quote:

You will have to put in your username and password, either on the options page or when it prompts you when trying to watch a video. ...

If not for this, I'd recommend it to others on the CR forums when they're complaining about Flash. (And, well, second reason I don't, being this might skirt their TOS...)

Even if it's safe and that data isn't compromised and stays on the local machine at now, being a third party app how well can we trust the developer end not getting compromised later at some point and affecting the app somehow?...

If it helps, the developer is one of the moderators at Crunchyroll (beardfist), who had also earlier developed the useful "CR Queue.0" extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cr-queue0/onkdfchaiebkbhlbcdgbemkblolppign)

My question got answered! Huzzah!

On my miniature Linux machine, Flash videos happily gobble the entirety of the processing power available, providing little by the way of fidelity in return. 480p is my upper limit, alas. For this reason the advantages of subscribing to Crunchyroll (et cetera) are offset somewhat.

It seems as if the impetus for any change in the status quo, painful though it would be for the providers, is likely to come from those responsible for streaming the advertisements themselves. My fear is that their incentive to do so may be quite minimal.

Tempest wrote:

The discussion with licensors goes like this.

Licensor: "You must protect the content so that it can't be downloaded."
Licensee: "You know that doesn't really work right? Anything we try to do is just a waste of time and effort, and it places annoying restrictions on our users."
Licensor: "Either you protect it, or we don't license it to you."
Friendly junior guy at the licensor company, in a hushed voice: "We know it doesn't work, just show that you're making the effort, that's enough."

Ever do I endorse the Developers' Approach, wherein making an effort to meet a requirement can often be disguised as actually meeting said requirement. It's not just good, it's good enough!

Ignoring security for a second, the benefits of HTML5 are vastly greater than Flash.

HTML5 is;
faster to load
universal
cheaper to maintain in the long term
requires less bandwidth to stream video
requires less processing power from the computer
is a hell of a lot nicer to tinker with if you need to

Flash is;
full of bugs, I get at least 1 error a day from CR not loading content properly
resource hogging
requires an extra process that isn't needed with HTML5

If I were an anime streaming site, I'd collaborate with other sites to build a HMTL5 player that would benefit all parties.

Going back to security,
I can rip videos from CR in a matter seconds, where as, YouTube (although easily doable with certain software), Amazon and Netflix have made it so I personally can not rip videos from them.
I can't see how they can state that Flash is more secure when I've only had 1 year of programming at school and have managed to download videos from them.

Asuri wrote:

Going back to security,
I can rip videos from CR in a matter seconds, where as, YouTube (although easily doable with certain software), Amazon and Netflix have made it so I personally can not rip videos from them.

Honestly, no site is that secure when a little HDMI recorder box from China that costs under $50 that strips HDCP is available. (This isn't an assumption, I have one and have tested it).

There is the basic "If you can see and hear it, you can record it" problem. DRM on video just prevents casual piracy, and if those people want to pirate, they can easily turn to the usual sources where someone else has done the work for them.

I stopped trying to keep up with web technology several years ago, so I do not know all of the current terminology and I might just be showing my ignorance, but I want to find out if I have the right ideas about some things:

HTML5, like all HTML, is text. You cannot play a video with a text file.
The HTML5 passes information about the video file to the web browser and the web browser then plays the video.
Which is not all that different from Flash except . . .

With Flash the browser uses an extension made by Adobe or actually passes the video file to a separate player, also made by Adobe.
With HTML5 the video player is part of the web browser. It is written into the original code for the browser, not an extension from a different company.
Because of that we still have browser wars and the HTML standards are not really standard because different browser makers implement the HTML differently in an attempt to make the "best" browser.
This is why different people get different results with different browsers.

Also, it seems that HTML5 supports several different video file formats and different video codecs. Which gives the browser makers and web developers a lot of ways to do things differently.

That's enough for now.
Do I have the wrong idea about anything?

I must admit: I didn't know HTML5 could be used to run videos or make vector graphics. I thought it was another updated pseudo-code used to make websites.

Is Flash/Animate still the dominant program used to make vector-based animation, or are there alternatives now? I know artists are a very stubborn bunch, and the ones I know who do vector-based animation treat Flash/Animate like the only such program to have ever existed and show zero interest in alternatives (and get annoyed if I even bring up the idea there may be alternatives, but with every sort of art, I've met at least one artist with tremendous brand loyalty and are uncomfortable/annoyed at the mere mention of alternatives).

XChampion wrote:

Even if HTML5 is more expensive to implement these companies should still do it. They will be ahead of the curve and save them hassle in the future. Its exactly the same thing as companies still using windows xp. Heck Adobe already stopped supporting Flash a while ago so it baffles my mind why companies still use it. Even a illegal streaming site I know can use a html5 player then why can't these million dollar companies do it.

Advertisers. Illegal streaming sites don't have to worry about sponsors from big companies, whereas legal streaming does. The advertisers are the ones giving them money, so they have to follow what the advertisers want.

I noticed a lot of companies are treating web advertisement as an offshoot of TV advertisement. That is, they'll take their TV commercials and have it run on Flash (well, Animate now). Oftentimes, they slow my computer down to a crawl. I'll bet it's all outsourced.

Pidgeot18 wrote:

Now, the saga of Encrypted Media Extensions is entirely different. It pretty much arises from the fact that the MPAA is very, very insistent that all streaming technologies prevent people from being able to save a copy of their stream to a hard drive. Never mind the fact that this is impossible, it puts companies like Netflix and Amazon in a tough position, because the browser vendors are desperate to kill Silverlight and Flash, the only two priorly extant ways of achieving this contractual obligation. And the entire debacle is made more complicated by the fact that everyone who's tasked with implementing it knows very well how pointless it is, but the people who are insisting it aren't even in the table (and won't listen to reason).

That's the MPAA for you. It reminds me of how the U$1 billion spent on trying to make an unbreakable code for the HD-DVD format was broken in a month, and all attempts they made to try to completely stop knowledge of the key from getting loose only made things worse for them.

It gives me the impression that the people running the MPAA do not understand new media at all and think they have much more control than they actually do.

The MPAA is like the Queen in Through the Looking Glass:

[Alice] said, "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

captain80 wrote:

YouTube has a HTML5 player which has an ad plugins, however Google has spent the last 4 years transitioning all of their ad serving platforms (both rich media and video) away from flash to HTML5. As other third party ad servers increase their support of HTML5, this should resolve fairly quickly.

You only need one holdout sponsor who refuses to use HTML5 to force video players to stick with Flash/Animate though. Granted, once there are few enough of them, they will eventually cave in to the pressure, but I'll bet there's at least one run by someone who doesn't see what the big deal with it all is.

AnimeLordLuis wrote:

I remember back in the early 2000's when computer geeks were all singing "flash a-ah savior of the universe" now there all singing "flash a-ah destroyer of the Internet" Laughing

Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to become the bad guy.

leafy sea dragon wrote:

Is Flash/Animate still the dominant program used to make vector-based animation, or are there alternatives now?

As it happens, HTML5 has Canvas; its own special means of rendering 2D elements. As the name would suggest, you define a blank drawing area in your page, then use a host of JavaScript methods to render and animate whatsoever you want. The results can be quite spectacular.

Ah, thank you. I tried looking this up before, but all I would find were Flash this and Flash that, and whatever information I tried to find with Canvas was confusing and conflicting. There are a lot of Flash loyalists among artists!

Let us all remember that Flash is the single biggest security vulnerability that has ever existed since the dawn of the World Wide Web. Let that sink in for a bit, because it's simply astounding how something so awful can still be in use today. Java is not far behind.

If Flash absolutely cannot be avoided then the next-best thing would be to use the PPAPI implementation of Flash (Pepper Flash) instead of the older NPAPI variant (Netscape Plugin API).

PPAPI Flash is Google's sandboxed version of Flash for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. It's essentially a band-aid for Flash that brings it out of the ancient Netscape era but make no mistake, it's still Flash, and the underlying Flash code is still the same inefficient, convoluted, unfixable mess it's always been except now it's mildly more difficult to attack the underlying system using Flash as a revolving 0-day door.

Desa wrote:

PPAPI Flash is Google's sandboxed version of Flash for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

Regrettably, I must state at this point that "PPAPI Flash" reminds me of Monster Musume for some reason.

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