i pad and Tennisplayer

[johnyandell]

Guys,
From what I can tell the i pad seems great BUT don't get one just to see Tennisplayer! You can't see our graphics. Why? How could that be? Just for fun I decided to send Steve Jobs an email explaining the problem.

I hear he responds to about 1 out of every 500 he gets. Let you know if he bestows a reply.

John Yandell


Mr. Jobs,

I am certain you have bigger issues to deal with but I wanted to give you a grassroots view about something that affects the i pad and our small business. 6 years ago we started what is considered the best tennis instructional magazine in the world, Tennisplayer.net.
We built an amazing stroke gallery with over 50,000 clips of the world's top players. We compresed them as Quick Time movies--- for all the obvious reasons.
We also have hundreds of articles from virtually every great coach on the planet, all illustrated with Flash animations.
If you have read this far, then you already know the problem. Right, tens of thousands of the older QTs and none of the Flash will play on an i pad. We have heard from dozens of disappointed i pad owners who thought the i pad would be perfect for using Tennisplayer, especially on the court.
Not sure that anything ever could or would be done to help us, but hoping you might be interested to know what the ripple effect is out here in the world. We have been way way out on the cutting edge for a long time, but now the rest of the publishing world is catching up with our model for paid, subscription based content. Just wish we could use a cutting edge product like the ipad for viewing it.

Sincerely,
John Yandell
Founder
Tennisplayer.net

[gzhpcu]

Hi John,
Steve Jobs will not implement Flash on either iPhone or iPad.

However, there will soon be a workaround offered:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente..._and_ipad.html

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been very clearly and fairly adamant that Adobe Flash is fraught with too many issues to be allowed on the iPhone or iPad platforms. No worries. Adobe has partnered with Greystripe to implement a solution that circumvents Apple's ban on Flash and enables mobile advertisers to deliver Flash content on the Apple devices.

[johnyandell]

Phil,

You are a beacon of hope...In practice, how would that work for us? You install something on your ipad and then you can see flash?

John

[gzhpcu]

John,
Am still investigating...

Greystripe’s technology now transcodes Flash authored ads as HTML5 to mobile devices that do not support Flash Player (such as the iPhone and iPad); these ads will be supported in both applications and on the mobile web. There’s no work for the advertisers or publishers; Greystripe says the transition from Flash to HTML5 is seamless. Greystripe’s new technology for Apple’s Safari web browser will allow real-time transcoding of Flash authored creative work to HTML5.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/07/gre...phone-sort-of/
It would seem that a you need to use a new version of Apple's Safari web browser(when it is released) on the iPod
and it converts the Flash content to HTML5, which is supported on the iPod... Hopefully, this includes tennisplayer.net videos in Flash format...

[johnyandell]

Great! The other issue is of course the QTs. By the way, Steve Jobs actually responded. I'll post below.

[johnyandell]

Steve Jobs Response

Got this response this morning from Steve Jobs--sent from his ipad...not sure what it means really. Anyone?

Sorry. Why don't you re-encode your videos in H-264? It's the future for mobile devices because the decoder is built into hardware and uses only a fraction of the power that decoding in software does. Mobile and battery life is why the world is changing. Come join us.


Sent from my iPad

[gzhpcu]

I think the jury is still out on H-264...

This article gives background information:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/201...-with-the-web/

So that’s the case for supporting free formats and also describes why we should be avoiding H.264 as a fundamental web standard. We don’t want to set ourselves up with another GIF situation and set up licensing like MP3 where we’ll be dealing with increased costs and restrictions over time. Google is likely to support something other than H.264 on Youtube and we’re likely to end up with something that’s better on a royalty-free basis as a result. And as I mention below, Theora and Vorbis are still excellent alternatives even if they for some reason don’t do as we expect.

Mozilla and Firefox continue to stand with the web on this topic. We don’t think that fundamental web technologies should be encumbered with patents and our actions and messages reflect that. We hope that you will stand with us on this.

I'll try and look into the question more when I have more time...

[johnyandell]

Very valuable Phil, thank you--and keep researching please! We may have to make you a technical consultant.

[jeffreycounts]

Typing this from an iPad. The new high speed footage in the forums will play on an iPad because they are encoded in h.264 so you can see those amazing clips (and the ones to come) on an iPad.

[johnyandell]

well that's a start...