Written by Jackson West
Posted Monday, March 19, 2007 at 5:00 AM PT

 

Five Features Flash Should Have

I love Flash-based video content. It’s lightweight, widely supported, and can do neat things like embed across sites and ping servers even when played locally. QuickTime is a venerable institution, and Windows Media Player has its fans (I guess), but the usability and functionality of web video took a huge leap with Flash Player 8. Still, there are a few features that I’d like to see become more universally implemented.

Jeroen Wijering Flash FLV Player

Jeroen Wijering’s Flash player (above) has a lot of these features without abandoning extant standards like SMIL, RTMP and ATOM, and the code is licensed under Creative Commons so it can be used non-commercially for free or licensed for a paltry €15.

  1. Closed captioning: This should be supported as a standard for so many reasons, starting with accessibility. Imagine YouTube clips failing gracefully into transcripts for text-based browsers, captions appearing when you muted the audio (great if you’re at the office), and a pop-up menu of alternate language subtitles. There are already standard timed-subtitle file formats for DVD video, and ReviewTube is a valiant effort, but if anything should be universally supported, this is it.

  2. Full-screen button on embeddable players: Sure, you can click for full-screen view on a clip’s home site, like at YouTube. But why not in-line full screen for embedded players? SplashCast has a neat implementation of this very feature, as does the Flash FLV Player I mentioned earlier.

  3. Boss button: Who hasn’t been at work, heard the boss coming and scrambled to alt-tab from a music video back to a boring spreadsheet. CBS is doing it for the NCAA’s, and combined with subtitling, it would vastly improve the experience for the average cube dweller. Flash can even track keystrokes, so there’s no reason a common hotkey combo couldn’t emerge across players.

  4. Easy access to FLV source: Right-click on a Flash area of your screen and the choices are less than entirely useful. Where’s ‘Save as,’ for instance? I know that part of the appeal to content types is that the Flash format is a proprietary one that serves as a thin layer of content protection. But why couldn’t people who want to leave their content open given the choice?

    Even a custom button in the player itself that reads ’save this video’ would be welcome. It’s not like eBaum’s World isn’t ripping off your content anyway, and it would probably save you some hotlinking bandwidth by encouraging people to mirror.

  5. Rolling playback: Quit asking me if I want to keep watching content, just play it already — though the more relevant, the better. This could work especially well if tied to the full screen feature. Let embedders or content creators compile a list of relevant clips to seed the initial playlist, and then let those roll after the first clip closes out if in full-screen mode.

    I probably won’t even mind too much if you slip a short ad in between. Of course I can always just click stop or close the window. If you need buzzword reinforcement, wouldn’t this help with stickiness and findability?

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Topic: Geekout, Online Video, Software
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Comments & Trackbacks

  1. p2p transport is needed for flash video.

    Abode purchased Kontiki they should use that acquisition for video delivery.

    Matt_ on March 19th, 2007 at 12:36 pm - Permalink

  2. Unless I’m misunderstanding, each of these “features” are already implemented as capabilities of the Flash platform. The application that you link to in the article is itself written in Flash, and I think that proves the point.

    It sounds like you’re suggesting that more content providers/application developers make use of those capabilities. I agree with that.

    Matthew J. Rechs
    CTO
    Schematic
    http://www.schematic.com

    Matthew Rechs on March 19th, 2007 at 12:58 pm - Permalink

  3. Matt — that was VeriSign that bought Kontiki, not Adobe, though the companies have partnered.

    Matthew — You’re right, and I think Jackson addresses this correctly in the article. It’s just my bad for trying to write a headline that fits in the space and not being precise enough.

    Liz Gannes on March 19th, 2007 at 2:10 pm - Permalink

  4. [...] 5 ways to use Skype Prime to make money?WebWorkerDaily: Redundant Internet for Web Workers?NewTeeVee: Five Features Flash Should HaveNewTeeVee: AppleTV to help VlogsGigaGamez: New PC Gaming Standard [...]

    GigaOM » What’s on GigaNET on March 19th, 2007 at 2:17 pm - Permalink

  5. Great article- but I agree that the headline should more accurately read ‘Five Features Every Flash Video Player Should Have.’

    That said, Adobe should be periodically surveying Flash usage and proactively adding these implementations as base features (or canned components) to the Flash authoring environment. Lowering the barrier to entry for ‘civilians’ to leverage Flash as an outlet will help bolster their emerging dominance in web video formats.

    Marc Siry on March 20th, 2007 at 1:41 am - Permalink

  6. Great timing for your call for support of captioning in Flash. Please check out CC for Flash, a free component developed and released by WGBH/Boston (public broadcaster and accessbility pioneer) just last week that can be authored into any SWF file for playback in Adobe Flash Player. We also released CCPlayer for Flash (also free), which allows those unfamiliar with Flash programming to embed video content in Flash into a Web page with miminal effort.

    Here’s the site for more info and to download:
    http://ncam.wgbh.org/news/ccforflash.html

    Why is it free? Because we got funding from the NEC Foundation of America, with additional support from Yahoo! to develop the component.

    Mary on March 20th, 2007 at 6:23 am - Permalink

  7. The two things Flash needs are a way to disable it and a way to force site to be useable without it.

    Larry on March 20th, 2007 at 1:31 pm - Permalink

  8. FYI there’s a new captioning component which ships with Flash CS3. I’ve got a demo online:
    http://popview.com/demos/popcast/captions/
    (the timing is a bit out, I know…)

    Stefan Richter on April 16th, 2007 at 2:18 am - Permalink

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