I wonder why Apple doesn't support flash video files on the iPhone
I'm not suggestion the iPhone support flash. I hate flash. It's the modern java. It just creates ugly, bloated, slow, non native apps. 99% of the time, a native solution is far better. Other than for cross platform games, there's no good reason to use flash on the web.
But I'm talking about flash video files on the iPhone, ".flv" files.
FLV files are just container formats around audio and video streams. Often, these streams use common codecs like h.264 that the iPhone already supports. So why doesn't Apple simply write a quicktime component that plays flv files?
Then, web developers wouldn't need to go out and re-encode all their videos to mp4. All they would need to do is detect the iPhone user agent, and wrap the flv file in a quicktime embed.
Instantly and easily the iPhone could play most (all?) web video! It seems like a super easy win for Apple: they support a ton of websites that simply don't work today, it's an easy change for the developers, and Apple can still hold firm to not supporting flash as a whole.
Some background info:
There seems to be confusion in the web world around what mp4 is and what h.264 is.
- Audio and video codecs (compressor/decompressor). These are h.263, h.264, mp3, aac, etc.
- File formats (containers). These are mov, mp4, flv, avi. They are the file that holds one of more audio/video streams that are encoded using a codec
- The player you see on the web. This is almost always flash, but would also be quicktime, or any other piece of software that can take a container file (mp4), decode the streams, and display it.
I'm saying that given flv files are simply containers around commonly used and supported codecs, it's strange to not play them natively.
I guess Apple is winning the war against flash so there's little reason for them to do something about it now... Websites are encoding their video in mp4 files so they play on iPhones, and websites are avoiding flash whenever possible since that means no iPhone support.
Only Apple could choose to not support the biggest web video distribution platform, and win.
