After an Adobe Support Engineer was asked when the iPhone and iPod touch would support flash on Mobile Safari, a response concluded that the wrong company was being asked. It doesn’t look like an update with Flash is near, but possibly a member of any of the iPhone dev teams can hack it up.
I personally think that Google bought exclusivity of flash video’s for YouTube on the iPhone, taking away any thoughts of flash for Safari on the iPhone, not allowing you to browse other flash video websites other than YouTube. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. There is flash somewhere in the iPhone as it’s running the YouTube app, but not being used for Safari. Hopefully Apple has future updates with the iPhone allowing Flash to run with Safari.
[Via Adobe]
I don’t know if there’s flash somewhere in iPhone, but certainly not in the Youtube app. Those videos are re-encoded as H.264
Nice post. However, to the best of the public’s knowledge, there is not, in fact, Flash anywhere on the iPhone. The YouTube app views videos encoded with the H.264 codec, hence the multitude of videos that are on the YouTube website but are not included in the app, those that haven’t yet been converted.
YouTube is in the process of converting videos to the H.264 codec for the iPhone, Apple TV (yep, it doesn’t have flash either), and possibly other future projects. For a while, I was under the impression that there was some algorithm that chose videos to be encoded first, potentially those with more views. However, I’ve seen quite a few videos on the iPhone’s YouTube with very few views, so I now have reason to believe that it’s a much more arbitrary process.
Anyway, thanks again for writing. Just putting my two cents in.
as others have noted, the youtube app doesn’t use flash. It uses the iPhones Quicktime player. Underneath it appears to use a generic API intended for mobile devices (URL is something like m.youtube.com)