Flash Compatibilty/QuickTime
I have several PowerMac G4 Mirrored Doors I use every day. Two at an office in Indianapolis and one here in my home office. I am limited to OS X 10.4.11 because I'm a graphic artist who is hostage to several clients (and an ad agency/service bureau) which uses such archaic software like Adobe Pagemaker 6.5, TypeStyler 3 and pre-CS versions of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
I have long been extremely dissatisfied with Safari since Apple craps on Mac users who still haven't bought new Intel Macs and made provisions to make Safari backward compatible. Likewise, the cretins at Adobe have abandoned us with Flash Player, and this new crop of shake-n-bake web page wizards don't bother to make their video files playable for us new "legacy" users.
TALK ABOUT PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE!!! I sincerely believe there is planned collusion among hardware and software companies to force people to continually upgrade or be left behind. In the dust. To die. Of thirst. Of hunger. Of neglect. And always held in disdain by those who must always be on "the cutting edge." (Sorry for the segue into a little Hemmingway-stylism.)
I was SO happy to learn about TFF which was/is designed to cater to us who languish in the mists of long-ago OS X versions but still need the web. A friend told me TFF allowed for Flash videos to be translated and played in QuickTime in real time. Now I see that isn't true.
However, I want someone to walk me through the process of finding and installing this "Perian" thing and then where to find the appropriate QuickTime player. I think I'm supposed to drag something called ".xpi" into a TFF window and drop it where it will install automatically after the Perian thing is taken care of.
Also, I can't seem to find a way to import my Safari bookmarks, but I'm told TFF has that capability.
One last question: if Flash has historically had so many security flaws, why are more and more people flocking to it???
I've seen articles and even shows on the History Channel which assert that the porn industry has dictated a lot of technology over the last few decades. VHS, and inferior technology, beat out Betamax because of porn, although Sony would've eventually figured out how to make their tapes play much longer, but by that time, it wasn't worth Sony's time or investment because VHS had taken over the market.
Likewise, I'm told by my Apple Geek friends that QuickTime IS superior to Flash on a number of fronts. Yet Flash seems to be taking over. Mind you, I don't know anything about the porn industry since I have a gorgeous wife and nearly a dozen young grandchildren constantly running in and out of my office. I have neither the time nor the interest, but I'm told that it seems that EVERYONE is abandoning QuickTime.
One last word: my accountant did an audit on my home business from 1985 to the present. His report shows that I've spent more than $14,000 on software and software updates ALONE (no games were included). The lion's share went to Adobe. Now Adobe won't sell me software at all even if I update my hardware to the latest version. I HAVE TO SUBSCRIBE TO ADOBE SOFTWARE FROM A CLOUD SERVICE!!!
I used to hate Microsoft. They were bloodsucking vampire thieves. ADOBE IS FAR WORSE NOW. I don't need Microsoft anymore. I have OpenOffice! AND IT'S FREE!!!
Backward compatibility is a huge issue with me, but I have found a number of work-arounds for opening Acrobat and Illustrator files, and I'd like to share them with everyone.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Allen
Keyboard shortcuts
Generic
| ? | Show this help |
|---|---|
| ESC | Blurs the current field |
Comment Form
| r | Focus the comment reply box |
|---|---|
| ^ + ↩ | Submit the comment |
You can use Command ⌘ instead of Control ^ on Mac
Support Staff 1 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 04 Apr, 2014 09:39 AM
Allen, thanks for your comments.
Contrary to your observations, I've found more and more websites offering Flash alternatives (html5 video/audio). The QuickTime plugin, on the other hand, is pretty much dead, like Real. It's either Flash or no plugin nowadays, and Flash is mostly used when people don't have the capacity or thoughtfulness to program an alternative or if they need to protect their content.
We can't translate Flash videos to QuickTime, sadly. Content that requires Flash and has no html5 alternative can't be displayed in TenFourFox, so you need another browser (such as Camino) that can load legacy plugins. Newer plugins (Flash 11+) don't run on PPC, and newer versions of Firefox/TenFourfox (17+) can't run legacy plugins.
Whether this is planned obsolescence I can't say. Apple has been known for making long-lasting hardware, and, paradoxically, at the same time is advancing more rapidly in OS development (not necessarily in the right direction), adding functions that require the latest processors, motherboards, memory and graphics cards. Adobe clearly doesn't care about legacy users who payed good money over the years.
What you can do is use the QuickTime Enabler to play html5 videos in the QuickTime Player (not plugin). This also works on YouTube, especially on low-end Macs that have a hard time playing html5 video smoothly in the browser. Download at
http://code.google.com/p/tenfourfox/downloads/detail?name=tenfourfo...
and drop the .xpi file into the browser window to install.
Secondly, you can help QuickTime to play more video formats with Perian. Download at
http://www.perian.org
Open the .dmg file and double click Perian.prefPane. It will install in your System Preferences. The final version is Perian 1.2.3, it's not developed anymore, but still works fine.
As for Safari bookmarks: "Show all bookmarks" in Safari's Bookmarks menu, then "File>Export bookmarks". The resulting .html file can be imported to TFF in the Bookmarks library by clicking the Star button>"Import bookmarks from html".
Finally, two projects (h.264 support and Shumway, an extension that displays Flash content in JavaScript, just like pdf.js displays pdfs) are in the making. For YouTube you can also use the MacTubes Enabler.