VRA : pvk on the blog

The title was provocative enough, as a catch, let's now go to the more reasonable part of this post.
The state of the video viewers on the web is quite dull : flash, flash and flash again. If at least flash was The perfect viewer. Or if there were no alternative to it. But it is not the case. Let's start with a list of possible options :

• Quicktime : you can see it, of course on Apple web site, and any good movie web site propose trailers in that format (hint ?).
• Realplayer (yes, it looks like it is still alive, mainly thanks to historical reason).
• Windows Media plugin for windows only (on the mac, you read the associated media file from within the QuickTime plugin).
• VLC plugin : the real multiplateform solution... if you find and understand the information on how to install it. And it is open source too ! Great, but still miss some polishing.
• DivX, a future RealPlayer ? Will they be strong enough ? The recent shutdown of Stage6 is not a good sign.
• the expected HTML5 <video> tag ? Soon, or right now if you are a lucky Safari 3 user, but I guess the market share of Safari is not (yet ?) large enough to follow that path. Bug that solution, with its common javascript API, looks like a great dream.
• Vivo... well that used to be a promising one, from a prehistoric time
• Java... ok, it is just because i am trying not to forget anybody, like for instance espresolutions

I guess there must be other solutions, especially on the Linux side, but this is not the subject of this note.
Another path is definitely to go away from the web browser to deal with video. And the way we consume video, in a stream, even if a forking stream, as opposed to the hypermedia navigation, may validate that move. A good sign is that after Miro and Joost, Adobe is following that path too... but again, this could be the subject of another note.
So, plenty of possibility, and yet, any new and "trendy" web2.57 site will just follow up the previous one and adopt ... Flash ! How an innovative behaviour this is ! That player which until the end of last year was not even able to display good quality video. Adobe was then so proud to announce H264 support, when it had been fully available in Quicktime for more than 3 years at that time.
So, you will say, now that Flash is ready to display high quality video format, stop complaining about it and adopt Flash. But the issue is that Flash is not that good yet, at least from what I have seen so far. And I am indeed very curious to see if any flash developer can prove me wrong...

So, here is the challenge : Can Flash do any of the following ?

And of course, I would be happy to hear about other challengers from the previous list.

Expected capacity	Quicktime	Flash
Fast forward (a clean one, not a clumsy jump every 5 seconds)	Y	You tube ??? no thanks !
Fast Rewind	Y	N
Jog Shuttle (let's speed it up !)	YES !	Forget about it
Frame by frame step forward and backward	YES	N
More generally, direct access to any frame already downloaded	Y	N (sevenload is almost there)
Precise information about the currently displayed frame	Y	N
Precise information about the amount of already downloaded data (in progressive download)	Y	?
Selection control (constraint the navigation within the video)	Y	N
Can read any format	YES ! (and install Perian and flip4mac if you miss any)	NO MPEG1, NO MPEG2, NO ...
Encrypted cache, no easy way to pirate the video, even in progressive download	Good enough if you don't have to deal with hackers	NO : if you want a secure solution, you have to stream the video AND adopt and pay for the full Adobe system (server) : No way to use apache for instance
Addition of a transparent logo	Y	Y (but I haven't yet seen the effect on the full screen display with such a logo)
Full Screen	Almost there : maximising the browser window.	YES !
Multiplatform	Mac/PC IE/FF/Saf and various option on Linux, but no official release. As a result the following demo will probably not work on Linux	YES!

I could add other concerns like the performance (energy, cpu usage) of flash when reading h264 compared to quicktime one, or the fact that having everybody using exactly the same tool produced by an unique company is an hacker dream world (windows ?), but these point are more subjective so I will let them out, but they should be taken into account. For instance, there is an area where you don't see flash for the video : every time somebody is paying for the content (VOD, or replayTV)

In conclusion, apart from the two last points form the table, QuickTime is much better than Flash. And to avoid just talking about it here is a snapshot of a demo based only on the Apple Quicktime plugin and Javascript, with the help of Prototype and Scriptaculous (and a link to the live version).
And the question : can anybody propose the same sort of interaction that what can be done with Quicktime + Javascript ?

And from here you can get to :

• The live demo
• Apple documentation to produce that sort of demo

You may already click on the longitude/latitude map to get the positions of the various panoramas, but I additionally created a map of all the panoramas shoot in Canberra on Wayfaring.com

Here is an extract :

23:28 : Just about time to finalise my participation to the Australian summer solstice instance of the WWP :
The World Wide Panorama

I propose my natural sanctuary : the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra…