Comment on The demise of Flash didn't bring any big HTML5/JS equivalent for watching animations; fast internet and better video compression made those types of animations become raster videos as well

• PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Spoken like someone who has never animated something in flash.

  Go ahead and try to make an animated music video in SVG. Tell me how easy it was. It’s it something a middle schooler could pick up easily after a couple hours?

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ok, tell me: How many people make animated music videos and publish them on Youtube, versus how many people make animated music videos and publish them as Flash videos in 2025?

    How many people did that in 2015 in Youtube vs Flash videos?

    Nobody cares about Flash because it sucks. Even back in 2012 Flash sucked. It was a really bad tech and by 2015 it was mostly used by people to dumb to learn real programming languages and frameworks.

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    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Where do you expect me to get actual numbers from?

      But as a proportion of content creators, back in the early 10s a huge proportion of content creators were submitting content to places like newgrounds. And itch.io equivalents all used flash.

      And around 2015, the total number dropped, but didn’t have a corresponding increase in non-flash equivalents.

      Why? Because what few tools existed to do so had a much much much higher bar for entry. So the content simply never got created.

      Flash sucked as a content consumer because the plugins had mediocre support and were full of vulnerabilities.
      But as a creator, it was great.

      People too dumb to dumb to learn real programming languages and frameworks

      Eww. that’s elitist as fuck.
      These people aren’t software devs. They shouldn’t need to learn to code in order to animate a video.
      For absolute shame. Wow.

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      • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You know what, I can give you numbers:

        The table shows how YouTube’s video count grew from 0.5 billion in 2015 to 5.1 billion in 2025. The biggest jumps happened in 2023 and 2025, with 800 million new videos each year.

        seo.ai/blog/how-many-videos-are-on-youtube

        Die Seite hat nach eigenen Angaben über 1.400.000 registrierte Mitglieder und über 660.000 Einträge (Stand: 7. April 2013).

        "The Site has, according to their own statements, over 1 400 000 registered users and over 660 000 entries (7th of April 2013).

        de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrounds

        (Had to resort to German Wikipedia, because their stats site has been down for a long time and wasn’t saved in Webarchive.)

        So you see, even at the height of their popularity, they had about 1/1000 of the content of Youtube and compared to now, it’s 1/10000. And that’s only Youtube, not counting Facebook, Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram and all those other platforms people use to share their content.

        And around 2015, the total number dropped, but didn’t have a corresponding increase in non-flash equivalents.

        So yes, there has been a massive, massive increase in non-flash video content, so much of an increase that flash looks like a tiny spec of a niche of internet history.

        In fact, most of the old flash videos have more views on youtube than they ever had in their original forms.

        Eww. that’s elitist as fuck. These people aren’t software devs. They shouldn’t need to learn to code in order to animate a video. For absolute shame. Wow.

        And now you are getting onto something. No need to program when making a video for Youtube.

        Flash was abandoned as fast as possible as soon as newer, easier and better alternatives arrived.

        Those who wanted to code, left for JS. Those who wanted to make videos left for Youtube and the likes. Those who wanted to make games left for Unity and other engines.

        Flash was just outdated, old technology. Nothing else.

        You have been elitist as fuck throughout all your comments in this chain, thinking that you are somehow better than everyone else because you got stuck in some old software and didn’t manage to migrate to something better.

        If you aren’t a developer, don’t claim to be.

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• insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A video has sound, can be exported from the animation software to a single file, and it can be played in a standard video player.

  Animated SVG does not sound like it does that, and needing new paid* software isn’t great for adoption either. And honestly, I’ve never even heard of animated SVG (I’m well aware of SVG and that it probably could be animated with CSS or JS but that alone does not make it a thing).

  The fact that vector works at resolutions (even if they don’t exist yet!) without the author even needing to think about it (let alone re-export) is an advantage. It can be great for many 2D aesthetics (many cartoons even used it!), the biggest complication is Adobe (and whoever is selling a subscription to what you mentioned).

  Also that people are still developing things with Flash (even if it has to be ran via Ruffle) tells me again that the issue isn’t vector, it’s that replacing a format with ingredients is not an effective strategy if you actually want people to use it.

  * yeah I know Flash wasn’t so great in that department, but communities were already using it

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The fact that vector works at resolutions (even if they don’t exist yet!) without the author even needing to think about it (let alone re-export) is an advantage.

    That’s why I was talking about meaningful advantages. Today, stuff gets exported in 4k and that’s it. No need for anything more.

    That nobody uses animated SVG should give you a clue about how many people value vector graphics over rasterization. It has uses (mostly when you expect stuff to get zoomed a lot) but only in quite specific use cases.

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    There’s ton of free software that exports to HTML5, including most major game engines. And people use that a lot. In fact, you can make VR games that fully run in a browser.

    Browser games still exist. They run on HTML5 now, not on Flash. Web video still exists. It runs on HTML5 players, not on Flash. Little animations in websites still exist. They run on HTML5/SVG/CSS, not on Flash. Flash really was just replaced by HTML5, because it’s plain better on every front.

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    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Today, stuff gets exported in 4k and that’s it. No need for anything more.

      I don’t think it’s as ubiquitous as you think. 1080p is pretty much standard (aside from old videos), 4K is still high-end and most uploading to that on YT are probably more tech-leaning channels who actually do use it. I even see new stuff from TV corps that’s still only 1080p.

      4K if you’re using a full-raster workflow is taxing at every step. Display, CPU/GPU (for software stability, filters/effects), RAM and storage, internet upload speed, also camera (and fast storage there too) where relevant. Also backups, and maybe even higher-res workflow to allow room to crop/re-frame if needed.

      I imagine it must be a disappointment to actually buy a 4K monitor for content viewing, stuck watching 1080p on new videos because the creators can’t afford that workflow or just don’t care. Even stuff that is 4K might have issues with encoding quality due to cost-cutting (or requires higher subscription cost).

      8K is a thing too (but even more impractical), so the problem is repeated there too.

      So yeah, I would say it is a meaningful difference that vector doesn’t have this problem.

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      • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Tbh, Vector only marginally solves that issue. If it’s a filmed video, then it doesn’t solve it at all, since it just creates “vector pixels” instead, which don’t scale either. So it would only work for artificially created videos, and there it would only work for 2D content, and only 2D content that doesn’t use bitmaps in it.

        It’s quite a limited subset of the videos one might watch. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I watched a 2D purely PC generated video that wasn’t a screen recording from some game (which is, almost per definition, also rasterized).

        The other problem there is that vector graphics can be rasterized into however many pixels you want, but the detail from the source material doesn’t improve. Yes, the edges around a flat area are smoother, but it’s still edges around a flat area.

        Compare the best flash animation you can find with some random demo video on youtube (or if you want to go to the extreme: with the graphics of some hollywood CGI). The infinite scalability of vector graphics won’t make the flash animation look better than the raster graphics image.

        The “infinite scalability” of vector graphics are a mostly academic point unless you are e.g. designing a company logo that needs to look sharp both on a tiny stamp and on the side of the corporate headquarter.

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