If Steve Jobs has his way, there will never be any way to play Flash videos, games or graphics on the iPad. His Majesty might not get his way with video, though, thanks to RipCode Transact Transcoder V6. It does its magic in the cloud, changing video from Flash to iPod/iPhone/iPad-playable formats such as MP4 or MPEG-TS.
RipCode's CEO says his special on-demand transcoder will work at the source, where a website is hosted. It detects if someone is using one of Apple's non-flash devices, immediately transcoding that video into an iPhone/iPod/iPad-compatible format.
That might take care of Flash video, but still doesn't address all those Flash games and graphics that populate much of the Web. So maybe Adobe will still need to smack Apple with that rumored lawsuit. Meanwhile, we users humbly wish for the day when we can play any content, anytime, anyplace, on any device — and pay for it just once, if at all.