As the computer market continues to move down in CPU power, price and size, the ability of a standard netbook to run sites like hulu.com has become questionable. The little Atom 1.6GHz processor just doesn’t have enough oomph to play large-format videos. (Youtube.com works great, its just the other sites that are pushing larger resolutions and larger bitrates and more sophisticated codecs).

Additionally, flash is just something that sits there on web pages using up your CPU, and that means that it’s using up your battery, which is bad. So, I’ve disabled flash altogether (via FlashBlock) on my netbook’s configuration, and I’m tempted to do so on my desktop machines as well. FlashBlock gives a nice “click to play” experience that I really prefer over the default of many sites which is to just start playing flash videos & sound as soon as you enter the page.

Maybe the netbook processors are going to improve, and maybe that means that in another year or so flash won’t be such a big deal, but in the interm, I think Adobe is in a pretty bad situation, especially due to the mobile factors I mentioned in my last post…

• No browser (mobile or otherwise) has Flash built in.  All browsers require a “plugin” provided by Adobe to play back Flash content.
• Mobile browsers are behind the times when it comes to plugin support, but even though, Adobe isn’t providing mobile phone manufacturers any sort of mobile flash experience. (FlashLight excepted, but this isn’t on major mobile platforms)
• Adobe got the short end of the stick when it comes to Flash.  Their playback platform powers the worlds largest sites (youtube.com) but they don’t see a dime of revenue from it’s popularity, because most users consume flash content but don’t produce it, and flash producers are who Adobe has previously marketed their products to.
• In all likelihood, Adobe wants to be paid for porting Flash to platforms like the iPhone and Android.  I don’t think that either Apple or Google would have any part in paying Adobe for such a “right” to use flash.  As proof of this, I present the YouTube non-flash applications on iPhone and Android, which offer a rich non-flash experience that could easily make it’s way back to the desktop browser.

Assuming that Adobe stands fast, and Flash never becomes an integrated part of the mobile browser platform, and, as the mobile platform base grows, sites that rely on Flash for their user interface will be locking out the mobile browsing platform.  So, these sites will realize that they would reach a larger audience if they offered a non-flash mobile-friendly experience.  Thus, they’ll port their flash user interface to AJAX, which works on both desktop and mobile browsers.   Flash usage will begin to decline.  As Adobe gets more anxious to squeeze the dollars from Flash, then the free mobile-supported alternatives will arise.  Greater use of SVG graphics, more AJAX, and possibly even some open-source flash-like technology that will be free and usable for mobile browser developers.

Did I mention HTML5′s <video> element?

Did I mention ViXimo?  This is just the beginning of mobile-enabled flash alternatives, and proof that the above is coming true already.

I actually played that first ‘racecar’ clip, and was impressed at the fullscreen quality, so I did some more digging and found some more about the video.

First, here’s a direct link to the content itself. The URL alone implies a couple of things:

1. It says that its 1280×720, which it actually is.
2. It says that its an “on2″ encoded file, which it actually is.
3. It looks like there’s some kind of encryption key there, so this URL may not work for you. Let me know if you try it and it does.

After downloading the file, we can see that its 28MB in size. Here are the interesting bits from “mplayer -identify”:

ID_FILENAME=7366107.on2?542422e9d0fc8676892221122126a3b813215d0
ID_DEMUXER=lavfpref
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=VP6F
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=0
ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=1280
ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=720
ID_VIDEO_FPS=30.000
ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=0.0000
ID_AUDIO_FORMAT=85
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=96000
ID_AUDIO_RATE=44100
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_LENGTH=128.78
ID_VIDEO_CODEC=ffvp6f
Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 96.0 kbit/6.80% (ratio: 12000->176400)
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=96000
ID_AUDIO_RATE=44100
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2

So, its 128.78 seconds long, and that gives us a total file bitrate of 1.76Mbps. We can see that its video format is “VP6F” which is On2′s VP6 encoder. I’m not sure what the extra “F” is. This codec has roughly equivalent quality to h.264. We can also see that they’re using 96kbps mp3 stereo encoded audio.