Page 1 of 1 The other day I was sitting in the office of one of my colleagues at the college where I teach and we were discussing some rather broad web issues. He teaches the hardcore coding side of the equation and I handle the hardcore design issues. Together we are the poster boys for a "Geeks and Freaks" project team. We were talking about an upcoming presentation around the Studio MX 2004 products that I am about to do for the faculty and I casually let slip I was coming to the conclusion that "QuickTime, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer/RealAudio are dead web technologies." His reaction was similar to someone who has just experienced a 20,000-volt cattle prod jolt to the armpit.
Now that I have your attention, as well, let me explain.
Why do we need the QuickTime, Windows Media and Real Players when it comes to video and audio on the web? I, for one, am seriously tired of Apple's persistent begging for me to upgrade to Pro when I launch their player. I am absolutely frustrated with Windows Media Player and its inability to either find a codec or to tell me which flipping codec is missing. Real, to me is a litterbug, strewing my desktop with RAM files. Not only that, I have absolutely no guarantee the users even have the plug ins and can see the content.
The other issue is purely selfish. If I control the web turf why am I ceding a piece of the interface to a third party?
Which brings me to that Trojan Horse known as the Flash Player.
Jeremy Allaire is the guy who hung that "tag" on the Flash Player and I couldn't agree more. At a keynote address at MX North in Toronto last year he claimed that the release of the Flash 6 Player was like "distributing hundreds of millions of next generation communication devices, and then later turning them on." He is not far from the truth on that one and the release of Flash MX 2004 and Flash Player 7 not only turned them on but pushed the dimmer switch dial to full power.
Up until then smooth video playback was the "sound barrier" of Flash. Videos over two minutes in length would suffer a noticeable performance degradation. The release of Flash Player 7 breaks through that barrier and opens the Web to the use of video without a third-party helper application.
I first got an inkling of this when I was working on my second New Riders book: "Building Dynamic Sites with Macromedia Studio MX 2004." One of the chapters talked about the new video capabilities of Flash MX 2004 and the behaviors packaged with the app that control it. We went through the usual author stuff of building the example and documenting it. I found it rather interesting but it was a couple of months later when I was working up a lecture on storytelling that it really hit me:"Kazart! I have just constructed a web video player that plays smoother than melted butter!"
I was designing a section of my site for the lecture notes and examples. One example was the use of the Simpson's character: Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. The point I was making was how we tend to negatively view those whose communication tradition is oral as opposed to literate. I had grabbed a clip of him talking and turned it into a Flash button. All the viewer has to do is to click on Cletus and the sound clip plays.
The next piece was a video of an elder Innu talking about how they would use gunpowder to start fires. (For those of you unfamiliar with Aboriginal culture, the Innu are more commonly known as "Eskimo".) I tossed the video into Flash MX 2004, threw in a couple of buttons from the library to control the video, added a couple of "pre-rolled" video behaviors and output the .swf file. Both Cletus and the Innu elder appeared on the same Dreamweaver MX 2004 page. Both were originally done more to get myself comfortable with the new version of Flash than anything else. It wasn't until I had loaded the pages after the upload into my browser that the implications of what I had done occurred to me. No QuickTime Player. No Widows Media Player. No Real Player. On that page were a simple Flash button with an audio clip and a video with a play and a rewind button. Click the video and there was no progressive download bar before it started to play. It just played. Click on the audio button and Cletus starts yelling at his "ma."
In typical developer fashion, I started playing "what if" games. What if I create the player skin and buttons in Fireworks MX? That's doable. What if I want to let the viewer choose which video to play in that skin? If you are comfortable with Flash Remoting, that is doable. What if I create the controls and skin in Freehand MX and lay a streaming video feed over it in Flash MX 2004? If you have access to the Flash Communication Server MX, that too, is doable. What if I want to have video and a small .swf? No problem because video in Flash MX 2004 can now either be embedded into the .swf file or called from the server when needed. What if I want to write my own ActionScript to control the video? That's easily done in the ActionScript editor of Flash MX 2004. What if I don't have the skill to create the controls in Flash MX 2004? No problem. The behaviors and the buttons are packaged with the application. What if I don't use the Web but want to use CD, DVD or incorporate video into a kiosk? No longer an issue providing you have Director MX. Flash MX Professional and Flash MX 2004 now "play nice" with Director MX.
Obviously, QuickTime, Windows Media Player and Real aren't dead technologies but that Trojan Horse has potentially reduced our reliance on them in the areas of video and audio on the web. Still, there is a weakness in this rather glowing report. The video editing and conversion tools in Flash MX 2004, while vastly improved in Flash MX 2004, are still not quite ready for prime time.
I don't make that statement out of arrogance. The Flash MX 2004 Video Wizard is a major step forward and does a great job for day-to-day stuff. It is just that I have really gotten into working with Sorenson Squeeze and once you have used that one for a couple of projects, you just aren't going back. The quality difference between the .FLV file kicked out by Squeeze and its counterpart in Flash MX 2004 is a night and day proposition. Squeeze gives me total control over all aspects of the compression process from 2-Pass Variable Bit Rate compression to choosing the Fraunhofer MP3 audio codec and how it manages sound. These options, and more, are not available through the Wizard.
This has also introduced a new workflow which I find to be rather interesting. The FLV format is now available on many of the major video editing and production systems ranging from After Effects to Media 100. If your client is giving you grief about video quality in Flash you can now tell him or her to give you the .flv. This puts the monkey squarely on their backs.
Still, in this new environment a typical workflow scenario would be:
If there is one thing that I just absolutely adore about what we do it is that new technologies have a way of sneaking up on us with no great fanfare. I get that feeling with the new Flash 7 Player. It may just be a Trojan Horse which, when switched on, is going to reduce the Web's reliance on third-party Players and quietly drive a renaissance of web video. There will be a lot of really crappy video out there but I will chalk that one up to people getting it out of their systems. Once we are over that hump, video on the Web will experience a great leap in quality as well as quantity.
That leap, in certain respects, has already occurred and you can see it in action at http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/story/. It is a Breeze presentation containing a rather large amount of video. Breeze takes MS Powerpoint and injects it with an obscene amount of steroids. The result, as you will see, is smooth running, quality video that, like its Flash MX brother, doesn't require any third party software for playback. This technology is still in its infancy and as its price point becomes more accessible to the average developer we will see a corresponding increase in demand for high quality on-demand video from our clients. This means we will be able to choose two delivery modes based on need: Flash 7 Player for the day-to-day stuff and Breeze for really glitzy presentations or interactive corporate training.
When that happens can you blame Jeremy Allaire if he looks at us with a smug look on his face and says, "I told you so."
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Keywords
Flash Player, 3rd party applications, QuickTime, RealPlayer, Windows Media
