Apple iPad Flash Video made Possible with RipCode

The story of the Apple iPad and iPhone OS not allowing flash has been going on for a while, even to the point now where Adobe are looking at taking legal action over it.

A company called RipCode looks to be the one who could bring flash to the iPad by introducing their new codek called TransAct Transcoder V6 that is designed to intercept video in the Adobe Flash based format and convert them on the fly in to a container on the iPad. This process is completely transparent to users of the iPad and will allow users to view flash content on the iPad.

The iPad is poised to further accelerate and expand the mobile video device market just as the iPhone has over the last several years. However, one of its noted shortcomings has been Apple’s lack of support for Flash video playback, given the dominant position of Flash in professionally generated entertainment, sports and news content. HTML5 has been purported to address this dilemma by introducing Apple device applications that are simply ˜thin clients’ communicating back to a web site hosting and subsequently delivering Flash files without a device-based player, but HTML5 is not yet widely adopted. RipCode’s Transactional Transcoding platform enables an alternate and immediate solution to this issue, opening up video content to users without requiring the content hoster to move to HTML5 or pre-transcode entire video libraries from Flash to an iPad-accepted container format. By transcoding the content ˜in the cloud’, it is essentially analogous to a network-based Flash to MP4 or MPEG-TS video adaption layer.

RipCode V6 appears to work in conjunction with some software called Commander and Detector which detects flash being downloaded to the iPad and once spotted, converts it invisibly to a format playable by the iPad.

It is unknown also at this point if Apple [AAPL] will agree to this or introduce an update to the firmware to essentially block this kind of activity in the future. But if it works as it says then it appears it could be good for both sides as in Apple and the iPad users.

Via: Notebooks