Tag / video

Wes Gorgichuk

Wes has an extensive background in JavaScript, Node, PHP, and MySQL development. He enjoys learning new technologies and has unwittingly received the, unofficial, title of DevOps at gskinner for managing the internal server infrastructure in addition to his programming duties. When he's not learning new technologies he can be found hitting the trails on his mountain bike or travelling the world and eating at some of the best restaurants there are.
by Wes Gorgichuk

Alpha video in HTML5

Alpha video in HTML5 should be easy right? Not quite, certainly not as easy as Flash was. In an article a long long time ago, from an internet far far away … I wrote about alpha video in Flash 8. (remember Flash?). Back then alpha video was a huge new feature that allowed developers to create a .flv with a transparent background that worked in all browsers. Allowing us to do all sorts of fancy effects. With Flash being a thing of the past, modern browsers are not in agreement on what video format we should use on the web. It makes things a little more muddled today.

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by Alex Garneau

The Evolution of Video in Flash

Back in the good ol’ days, Flash was very popular among many for playing media. It was used, online and offline, for displaying animations, showing presentations, and general advertising. Though there weren’t all that many options back then, such popularity still came mostly because it was simple. It was able to animate vector art very smoothly as opposed to large, clunky .gifs, as well as allow users to use simple interactions like mouse clicks and keyboard input. Macromedia Flash itself also had a very simple interface and UI, and was used in schools all over to help teach students multimedia and animation.

As the internet evolved, so did Flash. As video playback started to become popular, Flash had no choice but to adapt to keep up with competition and provide its users with the best experience possible. This involved cutting corners, taking back-doors, and even adding a whole new programming language to the mix at one point.

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