[red rocket]

<rant>

I hope this doesn't catch on.

Tried to watch this video on the web yesterday. The people who're hosting it (ScribeStudio) had the bright idea to use a wrapper GUI by this Brightcove company, which I'd never heard of before.

It was f*cking awful, I tell you. It's not a game, it's not interactive - it's bloody video content. So why split it up into eleven parts, embed it in a proprietary player stuffed with useless options and effects, make it play like total crap on a high-speed connection, unsaveable, the individual segments unlinkable, rendering the entire user experience a pain in the arse, if they just could have served it up straight?

As a consequence, I still haven't been able to view the video completely. Even tried Firefox with the "download video" and "livehttpheaders" additions, but that didn't provide me with direct links to the video files, either.

Why do the bastards do it? Why do they make it so hard for people to just watch the content? The material wasn't even copyrighted, so the anti-piracy argument doesn't apply.

Seriously, are there any users out there who want that kind of sh*t?

</rant>

[Millennium]

If I recall correctly, the basic idea behind Flash-based video players is that Flash is the only media plug-in they can be sure just about everyone has installed. A better solution would be MPEG-4 -all three of the major video players can handle that- but they decided to take the shortcut.