There seems to be a heated and highly polarised debate in progress about Flash and HTML5. There also seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around and some misunderstandings about what Flash and HTML5 are, what they can do and how the future of the web is likely to shape up in the next ten years.

Microsft, Apple, Adobe and Google are all competing for their own particular profit models and market share. Most of the debate and the disagreements have little to do with what the best technology for the web is or what’s best for developers and users. The link at the end of this post is a sober, well-informed article written by Jeremy Allaire, founder of the Flash MX platform, ColdFusion and Brightcove.

Also, please note that the developments in HTML5 RIAs that they’re talking about are in quite a long-term time frame by web technology standards. Don’t be fooled by Google’s “hard push” campaigns and their YouTube.com/html5 beta demo. Try it out in IE8 and you’ll see it’s still the Flash plugin video player and Internet Explorer still accounts for almost 59% of web browser usage, with versions 6 and 7 making up the majority share. Unless there’s some radical change in web browser user behaviour, we aren’t going to see a widely distributed full implementation of HTML5 on users’ desktop browsers for at least another ten years.

Here’s the article:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/the-future-of-web-content-html5-flash-mobile-apps/

In February 2009, I released the first beta version of the FLV Player plugin activity module for Moodle. It leverages the ubiquitous JW FLV Player and has been very popular among teachers and course content developers working with Moodle. I’m working on a substantial update for the module and in this article I’m going to write about some of the improvements and new features in it.

What has changed?

The most significant changes in the module will be:

• Support for alternative HD video streams.
• Support for audio descriptions.
• Uses simpler SWFObject 2.2 embed method.

Alternative HD video streams

The current FLV Player module can play any video format supported by Flash Player, which includes FLV, F4V, MOV,  MP4 and Youtube.com videos as well as MP3 and AAC audio files, and JPEG, PNG and GIF images (animation is not supported) and Flash animation files. See here for a full list of supported formats.

The new version of the player now supports an alternative HD video stream. This means that users can switch between normal and high definition video at the click of a mouse. All you need to do is provide two video files, one normal and one HD for the player to switch between. This is particularly useful for providing an alternative low definition stream to users with slow or intermittent internet connections.

Audio descriptions

This one’s still a bit buggy and doesn’t allow full control over the audio file. An audio description is a second, separate MP3 audio file that can be deployed alongside a video. It is synchronised with the video so that if you seek through it to a new point in time, the audio file plays at that point respectively. Users can switch the extra audio on and off as they like.

Audio descriptions are typically used for accessibility support for the visually impaired but can also be used for multi-language support, optional narrator’s voice overs, director’s commentaries, etc. I’m sure instructional designers, teachers and course content developers can come up with some creative applications for this feature.

SWFObject 2.2 embedding

Previous versions of the FLV Player module were a little “inconsistent” across different browsers and some suffered from bugs when it was necessary to perform Flash Player upgrades for users who don’t have Flash Player 9.0.115 or later installed. I’ve upgraded the module to SWFObject 2.2 and used a static embed method so that even with Javascript disabled, the video player will work, as well as detecting users’ Flash Player versions and informing them if they need to perform a Flash Player upgrade in order to view the video content, instead of automatically deploying Express Install, giving users more control. The new embed method has been successfully tested on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

A prompt to upgrade to the required Flash Player version.

Other features still supported

As well as these new features, the new version of the FLV Player will continue to support:

• HTML notes under the video playback window so you can put lecture notes, diagrams, graphs, tables, photos, links to files or pages, etc. on the same page.
• TimedText, RealText, ASX, ATOM, RSS and XSPF video caption formats (Users can now switch captions on and off).
• XML Playlists.
• Skins to change the visual appearance of the player (also includes support for XML based skins).
• Definable player control colours.
• Video poster images before playback commences.
• A variety of other JW FLV Player plugins (as a CSV list).
• Player configuration via an externally loaded XML file so that course-wide player policies can be established.

When will the new version be ready?

Many thanks to the brilliant developers at LongtailVideo.com for all their ideas and hard work. I’m still testing and trying to “iron out” the bugs in the FLV Player module but this should be finished in the next week or so. Unfortunately, there’s a bug in the Audio Description plugin, which is beyond my control and I’m waiting for the respective developer to resolve the issue. Hopefully, this will be soon.

Update…

After spending some time going over the various requirements for supporting the new plugins, the changes to the module code and the database table structure, I’ve realised that a number of the changes would “break” older instances on Moodle courses and lead to a lot of extra work for teachers and course content developers. With this in mind, I’ve decided to leave the FLV Player as it is for people who don’t need a feature-rich media player.

I’m now developing a very feature-rich “Media Player” module that will support most of the plugins currently available for the JW FLV Player as well as playlists and all the other features that we expect of a good web video application for e-learning. The module editing page will also be better organised to make it easier to use. The JW FLV Player plugins that I’m experimenting with at the moment are as follows:

• Audio Description
• Captions
• HD
• Info Box
• Live Stream
• Logo Box
• Meta Viewer
• Search Bar
• Snapshot

Please note that the Live Stream and Snapshot plugins require a server-side script and will not be enabled as standard for security reasons. The search Seach Bar plugin can use custom search scripts but only YouTube.com search will be enabled by default.

Here’s the Google Code project home page: http://code.google.com/p/moodle-mplayer/

When I first heard that Google Chrome had been developed, I was sceptical. The web browser market is already dominated by Microsoft with its encumbent Internet Explorer, currently at 67%, Mozilla Firefox is steadily gaining its share, currently at around 22%, with other browsers such as Opera and Safari making up the remainder. So the obvious question is why?

Apparently, for Google, it was a purely pratical consideration. The clever developer guys at Google are creating more and more user friendly gadgets, widgets and user-interface tools to make the web easier and more fun to use and therefore more appealing to us (Google makes its money from people using the Internet!). They’re also attempting to corner the market in what’s known as Cloud Computing. This is where applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and presentation software run on Google servers instead of on your computer which works in a similar way to web based email, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Google Documents is a popular example of Cloud Computing.

Existing web browsers just can’t cut the mustard

All these gadgets, widgets, and user-interface tools, which are necessary for Cloud Computing, run on a web browser based scripting language called Javascript. Compared to Flash, Javascript isn’t a particularly fast or efficient language and the problem is that if you have a lot of Javascript running in browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, it tends to slow things down quite dramatically and can even cause your browser to crash. Also, with Javascript becoming more and more common on websites, the likelihood of those particularly annoying situations where you’ve just spent half an hour or more carefully writing an email, report or article and suddenly your browser crashes and you’ve completely lost all your hard work. Generally, it’s best practice to write in a desktop based text editor and copy and paste afterwards.

Google Chrome to the rescue

This is where Google Chrome comes in. It was developed with running lots of Javascript in mind and optimised specifically for that purpose. In fact, Google claims that Chrome is around 56 times faster than Internet Explorer! It also addresses a number of issues related to stability and security rather elegantly and, in my opinion, is a far superior web browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and 8. For example, browser tabs in Google Chrome run independently so if a web page on one tab causes it to crash, other tabs are not affected. Google also keeps track of known Phishing and Malware websites and Google Chrome will warn you if you attempt to navigate to one of these sites on their blacklist. However, this doesn’t include unknown Phishing and Malware websites and if you’re really security conscious and would also like to block all those annoying flashing banner ads, I’d recommend using Mozilla Firefox with the NoScript plugin.

Criticisms

Ultimately, however, even in a superfast browser with all the bells and whistles, Javascript is a slow and inefficient language when compared to Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun Systems Java. While better support for Javascript is necessary in today’s web environment, I believe that if we’re really serious about replacing desktop with web-based applications, that is, to truly achieve fast, efficient, seamless Cloud Computing, we should be looking at these platforms.

Like all the other web browsers, Google Chrome is free and easy to download and install and even includes a wizard for transferring all your bookmarks and saved passwords over to it.

A quick note to Moodle users: Moodle’s text input editor is not compatible with Google Chrome. You’ll have to wait until Moodle 2.0 to use it!