Introducing JITB — a Flash Player Built On the JVM 126
MBCook writes "Joa Ebert has started working on a new program called JITB. Announced in a talk at FITC San Fran, it's a Flash player written to use the Java JVM to run ActionScript, and in a simple graphics test case (making 1 million calls to flash.geom.Point) was 30x faster than Adobe's Flash player. There is an impressive demo video on YouTube showing the point test."
Ironically... (Score:2, Interesting)
BSD (Score:3, Interesting)
If this really works, then we will finally get Flash to work on BSD and 64 bit version of Linux.
Re:Ironically... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, HTML5.
Try to watch Youtube on a laptop with a really slow wireless connection. Then switch to an iPad.
Re:Just what the world needs (Score:3, Interesting)
Er. Why would Oracle team up with Adobe`s Flash, given their JavaFX?
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.
Implementation dependant (Score:3, Interesting)
HTML5 can't do that.
HTML5 only specifies the source URL where to get the media from. Doesn't specify how to play it nor exactly how to download it.
Of course you could just implement it in a dumb straight forward way : like download the whole damn file and just play it.
But some data containers, like the OGG container with is pushed forward by OSS at least for Vorbis and Theora (and could be used for VP8 too) are designed in such a way that different chunks can contain different level of details (think like a progressive JPEG). A more advanced software could download the metadata and then only selectively download parts of the file that contain the chunks that it can play within the bandwidth limit. (Think : only downloading the first part of a progressive JPEG which contain the lower resolution data).
I don't know if Matroska (the preferred container for VP8 codec as part of Google/On2's WebM) can do it too.
Re:This corroborates what we all know... (Score:1, Interesting)
Flash IS OpenGL accelerated (on windows).
Sun's Java has been known to be the king of VM performance for quite a while. Nothing really comes close in terms of optimization. Flash is known to be one of the slower of the pack.
30x faster probably isn't far fetched.
Re:Implementation dependant (Score:1, Interesting)
HTML5 does allow bandwidth-sensitive streaming video.[1] Webkit browsers support a plaintext playlist file which provides a list of video segments in every bitrate you'd want available to the client. Open source software in the ffmpeg package can create the H.264 encoded files packed in MPEG-2 TS segments; the playlist can be made by hand or dynamically.
I am not sure, but I believe using a plaintext playlist file will allow the agent (browser) to support bitrate-switching streaming without depending on container formats supporting such functionality.
[1] http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StreamingMediaGuide/HTTPStreamingArchitecture/HTTPStreamingArchitecture.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008332-CH101-SW2 [apple.com]