闪电侠的最后一次欢呼

2020年是 last year in which Adobe will continue to offer the Flash Player for download for desktop browsers. (见 Adobe的博客 for details if you haven’t heard the news.) For the vast majority of content owners or those responsible for managing online assets, Flash-based content has been replaced by equivalents in HTML5 or native mobile apps. 对于一些, 虽然, the lack of migration from Flash to alternative mobile-friendly content is not a case of procrastination, 矛盾心理, 甚至是预算. The struggle has been more one of feature parity.

Despite Flash’s security issues and battery-hogging CPU utilization on early mobile releases, the Adobe (and formerly Macromedia) technology fulfilled the promise of “write once, deploy everywhere” prior to the smartphone 年龄. Flash also offered a consistent experience in desktop browsers for real-time, low-latency audio/video streaming playback and publishing essential for many “first-of-kind” online auctions and video conferencing web applications built between 2006 and 2011.

While many Flash video streaming applications have been replaced by HTML5 equivalents such as HTTP 在线直播 (HLS) and DASH (most only in the last 5 years when HTML5 浏览器终于提供了MSE[媒体] source extensions] and EME [encrypted media extensions]), the only “ultra-low latency” (<1 second) option on the table was—and still is—WebRTC. Now, the problem with WebRTC is one that never plagued Flash: consistency across browsers 具有视频和音频编解码器. 带闪光灯, 不管浏览器厂商是什么, you had the option to consistently deploy real-time apps that utilized core codecs available in the Flash Player, 包括索伦森·斯帕克和后来的H.264. 与 WebRTC, competing vendors prioritize VP8/9 在H.264或反之亦然(或只有一个或其他可用). As such, costly and immature server solutions need to transcode real-WebRTC客户端之间的时间流. 简而言之, converting your online auction house over to WebRTC isn’t as simple as it should be.

Now, the situation with WebRTC has improved immensely over the last year since H.264 and Opus are available across all of the latest browsers from the major vendors (see go2sm.com/mozillawebrtc 详情)，以及您 may be surprised to know that WebRTC can be reliably used on mobile web as well. 这意味着 if your users have recent releases of these browsers, then yes, you can achieve low-latency 实时视频和音频在一个web应用程序. However, there’s always a snag—Firefox for Android 68年以后呢不为H提供支持.264 anymore, as the Google Play store restricts Firefox from installing the OpenH264 codec.

So, where does that leave us for the last holdouts of Flash apps in this category? If you’re using Flash for low-latency real-time streaming, you’ve got about a year or less to try moving over 到WebRTC解决方案. 这是什么意思呢完全? Any code you’re using on your Flash-based media server (Adobe Media Server, Wowza流媒体引擎, and so on) needs to migrate to WebRTC instead of Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). 您还需要创建 a WebRTC client to replace the Flash component. That’s likely going to be a more difficult 转换过程的一部分, as WebRTC client software development kits (SDKs) are very specific to the server component. RTMP handshakes with Flash clients could be easily ported from one RTMP server to another, but WebRTC solutions have very tightly coupled client-server SDKs. 是否进行了必要的尽职调查 to make sure whichever WebRTC solution you choose meets all of your business and technology requirements.