Apple hates Adobe and no matter how essential has Flash become for the Web, Apple has it own personal score to settle with it. Well this could have caused a lot of trouble with viewing videos on Facebook, our beloved social network. Today that changes as the social network decided to find its our work around method to enable its users to watch videos on the iPad.
News across the Web that the social networking platform was using the HTML 5 compatibility to enable users view videos but that is not the case. The platform is saving itself the burden of evolving into the newer format, rather converting the videos to .MP4, the format we are all aware of and see widely played on mobile device and the Web. This had to happen, I mean the social network is definitely a must have for everyone and if iPad were to suffer the angst of Apple and leave its users missing the fun of social networking on the device.
Facebook joins the many websites and video portals who have been forced to put videos in Apple supported formats. The functionality of converting flash based videos to .MP4 isn’t anything new and had been in use by video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc before they migrated to HTML 5 and like these sites did, Facebook will rely on conversion of videos at the backend.
What this simplifies to is this your videos no more play on the Web window and every time you play one on Facebook it undergoes a short process and plays it back on the device in a new window.
I personally think this is very confusing as these sites continue to be blackmailed by Apple and its stubbornness. It can’t just go ahead doing all this rubbish stuff even if it is providing users with great tools and devices. I mean just think of it to what extreme they went and had Gizmodo’s Jason Chen’s house raided.
[Thanks Mac Stories]
2 things here:
1. It’s quite a stretch to say that Apple “had… Jason Chen’s house raided”, unless you have supporting evidence for that statement.
2. Moving towards standards-based video, as opposed to plugin-based video, benefits pretty much all non-PC internet devices, not just Apple’s.
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Go read the post – i don’t think police or authorities have craps of time to raid an editors’ house for no reason – it can be a rumor but i will stick to one side of it as my take on the news.
2. I agree with your point – but at present Facebook videos aren’t going through standards to run on iPad – they are being converted. I wouldn’t mind if Facebook implements HTML5 bit for videos on sites and shrugs Flash then. But for now it just doesn’t sound right.
Thanks -
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