Posted this over at the Flashlite group on Google Groups. Re-posting here.
Good news and bad news.
The good news is, Gary Rosenzweig at Developer Dispatch ported some of his Flash 5 games to work in Quicktime. Quicktime, the player, actually has a series of tracks or “layers” that can be baked into a .mov file. So, he apparently got a bunch of these to successfully work in Quicktime embedded in Safari, the web browser that the iPhone will use.
The Bad news is, I remember JD reporting that Apple turned this off last September. While he says it’s Flash 3, Gary’s saying it’s Flash 5. Either way, if you’ve ever seen how complicated it is to futz with Quicktime settings, then you know there is no way in heck a consumer is going to turn this on, especially on an iPhone.
Straight ghetto, but Flash 5 is better than no Flash. Furthermore, you can depend on Quicktime actually being there on the iPhone… I think. Anyway, nothing official yet.
Just because the phone supports quicktime, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to support every single format in the quicktime container. I highly doubt they will have added flash 5 support to quicktime on the iPhone, almost nobody uses it.
The iPhone looks cool and all, but the whole no-3rdparty apps, no Java, and no Flash thing kinda puts me off it.
Apple hasn’t really said anything yet. The fact they have a special youtube player gives some hope… but, really, we have to wait I think.
Apple has said they are asking YouTube to convert all of their videos to H.264 so it’ll work on the iPhone. YouTube has acknowledged this.
youtube are idiots if they ever decide to convert all thier vids to h.264… i would ask apple to pay me a lot of money to do that… i really hope apple get thier act together…
Boo Apple!
Not supporting Flash, Java, etc… is just a closed box mentality. Apple fans choose to overlook this, but if the iPhone was a Microsoft product – exact same thing feature for feature – there would be tons of bad press about the lack of these ‘basic’ features.
What really gets me is ringtones. You can make one from the apple store for $1, but you cannot play your own MP3? Even when the darn thing is a music player? Man, talk about nickle and dime business practice. Gimp your device and charge for a feature that every other smart phone on the market can do.
If Apple would have put Flash in the browser, and they would have hit the simple features one would expect from a phone, all good. Flash 5 hack – maybe? Naw, not worth the effort.
ryan, Youtube is already converting to H.264. I have their videos on my Apple TV and it’s not FLV…
YouTube only converts Featured and Most Viewed videos to H.264 … if you upload your own, you won’t be able to view them neither on AppleTv or iPhone.. LAME Apple!!!!
Updated info:
https://www.jessewarden.com/archives/2007/06/flash_on_the_ip.html
(This line contains a typo: ‘Gary Rosenzweig at Developer Dispatch ported some of his Flash 5 games to work in Quicktime.’ Gary is running JavaScript games on his iPhone, and the device does not play SWF via QT.)
jd/adobe
Apple should just buy adobe already
then they can stop pissing on flash for their codec being almost as good as quicktime remember when they tried to sue sorenson over flash video
corporations can be so selfish