Tom - remember I asked about vids on the iPad

[Skywatcher]

Someone on spaceweather.com this morning has posted an amazing video he took in his back garden of the space shuttle in orbit - can you play it on your iPad?

[catrancher]

Sorry mate!

Doesn't appear that it can do that natively. When I clicked on it, it offered to open it in AirSharing (an app I've got that's kind of like a Swiss Army knife) but it doesn't actually play it.

Did a quick Google search and found this article:
How to play AVI files on the iPad

But it seems that they're indicating you've got to convert them on your Mac first. Kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it?

Tom (... I'll keep looking!)

[Skywatcher]

It does really, video is such a part of web browsing today - the BBC website has playable football highlights embedded and weather forecasts embedded and none of them work on the mobile devices; it does put a wrinkle in the ' best browsing experience' - hope this changes with the html5 Keith talks of

[catrancher]

hope this changes with the html5 Keith talks of

I really do think it will.

For instance Adobe is terribly upset with Apple right now because Apple changed their license agreement so that effectively, developers can't use a Flash bundler that Adobe was going to release with CS5. Oddly enough, I can understand Apple's reasoning behind this. Flash is a cpu hog and has as many security holes as a block of Swiss cheese. Adobe says Apple is being closed but in fact, I believe Adobe is the one that's closed. If you code for Flash, you're locked into Flash. If you code for HTML5 as Apple is embracing, you're working with an industry standard. Granted, it's not terribly prolific yet but give it time.

When major video sites like YouTube start working with technologies like HTML5 as they've been beta testing for some time, I think the handwriting is on the wall. The only issue that remains for HTML5 video is which video codec's will become "standard". Right now that's still up in the air.

Adobe's had it easy for a number of years by providing Flash video. They were first to the table with a technology that had universal appeal and was universally applicable. I think people (spearheaded now by Apple) are kind of tired of a close standard (is that an oxymoron). The internet has tried to be based on open standards. That's why so many companies can make web browsers and such. I think Apple's just pushing to get there too with video.

Tom (... also not fond of being held by the throat by Adobe!)