Apple Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Adobe Flash

In recent months, Apple has come out strongly against Adobe's Flash platform by affirming that there won't be any support for Flash on Apple's mobile products (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad).
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Search engines Yahoo and Google learn to crawl Flash sites

Statistics show that Adobe's Flash is installed in a whooping 98% of computers connected to the internet. Using Flash, a web developer is able to give his imagination a free reign and build gorgeous multimedia intensive albeit equally functional sites.

But till date, building Flash based sites had a singular drawback. That being, the search engines had no way of indexing them unless the web developer also included text in his Flash site explaining what the site or rather the content on the site was all about.

Some time back, Adobe released the Flash file format SWF as an open specification which encouraged third party developers to create applications which could display Flash files. Now Adobe has gone one step further and is working closely with Internet search engine companies namely Yahoo and Google to help them in indexing Flash files. This is a clear green light for all web developers to start creating sites which are heavy in Flash content. This also means web developers can reduce the size of their Flash sites by doing away with ordinary text.

You should know that the latest version of Adobe Flash player is available for Linux platform as well which makes Flash a universal format to share and showcase content across the web.

Read the official news from Adobe and also the announcement from Google.

Download YouTube videos - A list of online file conversion tools

In the last couple of years, Flash has fast risen to the top as a very popular form of sharing video, audio and data content online. But creating Flash content has a big drawback which is that the end users need to install a proprietary closed source software stub (Adobe Flash Player) to view the content. To be honest, Adobe has already released a native Flash player for Linux and the Linux version is updated in tandem with the Windows and Mac version so it is a good thing. More over Adobe has been consistently improving and adding new features to its Flash player.

But those who do not like to have Adobe Flash player installed in Linux or those using other Operating systems such as the BSD's can make use of online resources to convert the Flash video files to a number of formats. Some of them which I have found useful are as follows :

1. ConvertTube.com - This online service converts YouTube videos to a variety of compatible file formats and provides a link for download.
2. Media-Convert.com - 100% Free online file conversion which includes images, audio, video and documents.
3. Vixy.net - This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology (outline in Japanese). It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.
4. Flv2Mp3.com - This online service converts Flash audio files to Mp3 format.
5. Zamzar.com - Use this online service to save and convert YouTube videos and Flash videos from numerous other sites.
6. Viloader.net - This is another online service which allows you to convert media files from one format to another.
7. Hey! Watch - Hey!Watch is a simple and robust encoding platform for both individuals (B2C) and companies (B2B). It allows conversion of videos to a variety of formats. But you need to register with them first to start using their service.

Flash player version 9 release gets H.264 support

The recent news from the Adobe camp is that the now ubiquitous flash player version 9 (Update 3 Beta 2) currently has H.264 standard video support. The H.264 is a standard which is deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players.

What this translates for the lay person is better quality of video and audio in flash players. H.264 is also an open standard. It is currently believed that the penetration of the Adobe Flash player is just over 98% making it the most used media player [Courtesy: ReadWriteWeb].

You can download the latest version of Adobe Flash player (version 9) from the official Adobe labs website.

Incidentally, you might also find this quite detailed article by Tinic Uro who explain all the new features of the latest release of Adobe Flash player ver 9 an interesting read.