Home » Archives » July 2011 » One more reason to hate Flash™ [Previous entry: "My B'Day"] [Next entry: "Fall already?"] 07/20/2011: "One more reason to hate Flash™" listening to: Eureka
feeling: Fine like wine...

In short: It's make bullshit acceptable.

Hulu aggregates a ton of content from a ton of sources and producers, and the Flash Video Encoder does the heavy lifting of transcoding different video codecs into something that we all can use.

Some content sources (Sony's Crackle, I'm looking at you) make the Flash plugin go all Memory-Mad and max out my video card, system memory, CPU and GPU.

Other content sources play really nice with the rest of my system. I can run them full screen on my 30" Cinema Display with no lag, no frame drops and no syncing issues; or I can run them full screen on a second monitor while I get some work done on my 30".

What's the difference?

Really, I don't know. I suspect that it's because the Flash Video Encoder is correcting some really badly encoded video that my system would otherwise no play.

"So...what's wrong with that?" you might ask, "At least you can play the video!"

The problem is that because people can watch the video, and don't understand the problem it's causing, they'll never let the offending content providers know that whatever video codec they're using is causing problems.

If the video doesn't work at all, they probably would have caught it themselves, and if not, the hordes of people who want to watch the archive of NewsRadio on Crackle would complain loud enough to get them to correct it.

As it stands, the only people who realize what's going on are anti-Flash super-nerds like me.

Thanks Flash, for making the mediocre internet possible. ;-)