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The irony of Flash

October 1, 2007 |

Flash animation began as a convenient and quick loading way of putting rich content into your site. In its’ glory days, many a band websites could be found in entirely flash versions that loaded slick, moving graphics and lots of cool slides, fades and other transitions.

Recently, Flash has become the topic of scrutiny for many web development experts. Some still say it is useful when done tastefully, others just plain hate it. Flash animations, especially lengthy loading intros, are fast becoming recognized as a visitor turn off. Especially with things like AJAX taking over in the department of page flashiness i.e. - dynamic animations without reloading the page. But since the advent of megasites like YouTube and other sites utilizing .FLA or .FLV players, many developers have taken a second look.

Flash is easily one of the best ways to deliver movies and music without offering direct download. The old fashioned way was to embed with Media Player or Quicktime, or even link direct to the files themselves, which would cause quicktime to fill the entire browser window. Now website owners can embed a player of their own design right into the pages of their site, with a relatively certain idea of what the end-user is going to see.

The video gallery right here at Needless Productions uses a flash player that loads movies quickly and easily. The funny thing about Flash is that what began as something that over saturated the web with entire flash websites that took days to load for some, seems to have found a home in the world of Audio Visual delivery online.

A great example of how accessible this technology has become is the Riva encoder and player. Riva encodes your video files to the FLV format, and comes with a player that you can embed on your site. I chose to store the Riva player singularly and dynamically embed each video as it is called by the browser using PHP, but it is primarily available as a stand alone player, or to be individually embedded into HTML pages.

Tagged : Web Development, Software Review

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