Flash problems

I use two browsers (Chrome and IE 9). Personally I prefer Chrome. Chrome uses his own Flash (with some kind of sandboxing). Everything time I click "Record" Chrome ask if I want to allow it. I don't know a way to "Allow Everything" on a website. Anybody knows a way to teach Chrome? Internet Explorer uses an otherwise installed Flash. Here is an explanation how to enable Flash to access my microphone. http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help09.html But for some days nothing happens when I click the "record" button. Anybody has advise to activate Recording again? Greetings Jan

rocketlanguages.com should get rid of Flash completely. There is nothing on the site which can't be achieved using open web technologies, and Flash is a whole realm of trouble. Believe me, I'm a web developer myself and know what I'm talking about ;).

Maybe so, but to be fair to the Rocket team, not so trivial to change. I'm an ex web developer, now retired.

now I managed to get Chrome to work fine with flash :-) (rightclick on record (Settings=>Remember settings) I can continue my studies of chinese now much better.

Hi guys - The iOS app is now available in iTunes! Flash is definitely proving to be a bug-bear for us and many other sites!

"Maybe so, but to be fair to the Rocket team, not so trivial to change. I'm an ex web developer, now retired." ... most of the Flash content is for Audio, that should be fairly easy to do with HTML5 something like this: <audio controls> <source src="file.mp3"> <source src="file.ogg"> [here comes the Flash fallback for browsers that don't support HTML5 audio, i.e. the current code] </audio> Downside is that no audio format is supported by all browsers (currently at least), so the audio files should ideally be provided in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format. But there are tools to make conversion (from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis) fairly quick and easy and audio files are not that big that the additional disk space requirements should be a major problem. On the positive side: it would be a great improvement for a large number of Rocket Languages user. About audio conversion: mpg321 and oggenc can do this on Linux, like so: mpg321 input.mp3 -w - | oggenc -o output.ogg - Or to convert an entire directory all at once: for f in *.mp3; do mpg321 $f -w - | oggenc -o ${f%.mp3}.ogg -; done It certainly requires some work to migrate from Flash to HTML5 audio, but it doesn't seem to be too challenging and IMO the advantages (benefits to users who no longer need a plugin) outweigh the disadvantages (the required work and requiring 2 audio formats) sufficiently.

Hi Markus, We are currently unable to use open web technologies for everything on the site. One of our most popular features (Rocket Record) is currently very difficult if not impossible. We are hoping to start moving it over to open web technologies once the standard improves. As for html5 audio, most of the audio on the site is setup to use html5 audio as a fallback when flash isn't available. We haven't converted all our audio to ogg as flash support is good enough for the moment (As a side note we tried switching to a html5 audio player by default back in 2010 but had issues and had to drop it from the default). Mozilla recently announced they will be supporting h.264 for video so we are hopeful that mp3 support in Firefox won't be too far behind. A lot of work has been put in by the industry on standardizing video support in browsers but unfortunately audio has been lagging behind for a few years now. I hope this answers your concerns

Hi, MP3 support in Firefox has even already landed for Windows 7 & 8 in Firefox 21, see: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/webrtc-enabled-h-264mp3-support-in-win-7-on-by-default-metro-ui-for-windows-8-more-firefox-development-highlights/ Mozilla is currently working on support for Linux and OS X too. Unfortunately they need to use the operating system codecs rather than implementing it directly, due to the patent issues that H.264 and MP3 have (WebM and Ogg Vorbis would have been the better choices, but the better choice often loses in such battles, unfortunately). I am writing this with Firefox 21 on Windows 7 with Flash disabled, but audio doesn't work here. Give it a try yourself: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#aurora IMO it should really be the other way around. HTML5 audio (& video) should be the default, and Flash the fallback if HTML5 audio/video is not available. The Modernizr JS library can help to query for which formats are supported, in case you want to use MP3 only for HTML5 audio with Flash fallback. Which is only the 2nd best solution (best would be MP3 & Ogg Vorbis of course), but still better than Flash only or Flash as primary source. I haven't explored Rocket Record yet, so can't say much about this feature. But for video and audio I don't see much reason why to wait any longer.

Hi Markus, It looks like Firefox 21 isn't out for another 2months, we will review when that happens. What audio doesn't work with flash disabled? We have numerous different systems across the different parts of the course and I can file a bug report if you can give me a little more information. We already use modernizr on the site and like I said investigated the issue thoroughly but as it stands it is not a high priority mainly due to the amount of work required. It is not as simple as running a quick linux command. I'm guessing we have around 100,000 pieces of audio and on top of that there are many systems, servers, databases and code that would need to be updated. For video HTML5 is the default rather than flash but it wasn't and still isn't as easy with audio.

fire fox works much better with flash