Randy Troppmann

Through the years I have worked with video in Flash in varying ways. As Flash has evolved new tools have been made available that solve old problems. Here is an example:

One would think that running a Flash based multimedia presentation from CDROM would be ideal: fast dedicated bandwidth. But as it was in Flash MX days, if you tried to load a video from CDROM from within Flash, the entire application froze until the entire video was loaded into memory. If your video was over 5mb in size this was a big problem. With Flash MX2004, streaming FLV files made this problem disappear.

Fast forward to today. Flash’s recent codec enables video that is smaller in size and better in quality. And since the web is what really matters, the Flash Player’s ubiquity and cross-platform/cross-browser compatibility has resulted in a coup d’état where Flash reigns king.

Check out Tom Green’s article The Rise of Flash Video.

YouTube found the holy grail of the internet. Video that just works. You click play and the video plays. For me it has been a near flawless experience. It does not matter what browser I use or what platform I use. Before YouTube there were big time bandwidth and technical problems with trying to host web content.

Yes, the video quality is poor. Yes, the clips are short. Who cares. It works.

Maybe I am just being naive … Today I came across a blog that had a reference to RUNNINGMAP.com in the title of the entry. It was an incoherent blog of sort-of-related text. Scraps of information squished together. And … more than half the page was filled with Google Adsense. AHHHHHH. I get it. Someone created a bot that blogs away and ultimately gets hit because of its keywords. In this case Google’s Blogsearch indexed it. This is an easier way of making money than VLTs!

Stuff like this the dental plaque of the internet. It needs to be flossed and eradicated. And robots are scary.