I've seen a few of these stories around the place, basically people making a big deal out of the HTML5 <video> tag and Youtube potentially supporting it (not just experimenting with it).  The main problem is that browsers such as Firefox and Opera don't support the underlying format used on Youtube for this <video> tag.

Personally, I can't quite see what the big fuss is really about - I mean, people supporting this seem to hate Flash here, and I'm not terribly sure why exactly.  Sure, it has it's issues, but then, it's installed on a large majority of PCs.  I can't really see a huge advantage of using the HTML5 <video> element.

As Google has their own browser which obviously supports Youtube's potential move to HTML5 <video>, some people seem to be speculating what could happen to Firefox if they decide to drop Flash support.  And so all sorts of people seem to be asking why Firefox simply won't support the format, and Mozilla responding with their various reasons etc.  But personally, I don't see this as a big issue.  It would probably literally take someone less than half an hour to write a Firefox plugin which would convert <video> tags back to Flash for Firefox.

What do you think?


EDIT: I guess one potential issue is Google leveraging this to promote their browser - eg "can't see this video?  Try installing Google Chrome", though I wonder how well this would side with competition laws.

(This post was last modified: 16/02/2010 03:19 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

I agree with you - at least if there are going to be standards - let there be standards.

Lacking compatibility shouldn't qualify.

Anyway, I read up quite a bit about the tag a few days ago and came across this fantastic page regarding it: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html

This should give a good idea of what's going on:

<video> element support
IE8 - No
IE7 - No
Fx3.5 - Yes
Fx3.0 - No
Saf4 - Yes
Saf3 - Yes
Chrome - Yes
Opera - No

And then a Video/Audio/Container compatibility overview: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works

   "There is no single combination of containers and codecs that works in all HTML5 browsers.

       To make your video watchable across all of these devices and platforms, you’re going to have to encode your video more than once."

Conclusion: Stick with Flash until they can agree on what's going to be used...

(This post was last modified: 16/02/2010 03:44 AM by S7*.)

I think Opera does support it - at least there was a beta that did a while ago.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:I think Opera does support it - at least there was a beta that did a while ago.

I suppose it was looking at Stable releases.

(This post was last modified: 16/02/2010 01:17 PM by MysterySword.)

I'm gay.

MysterySword Wrote:Firefox 3.6 or 3.7 Alpha supports it, I've heard. Most browsers either support it or are going to do so. IE is the biggest problem, though. Microsoft has never cared too much for web standards.

EDIT: Firefox 3.5 supports HTML5? Guess I have to have an addon, 'cause it never wanted to work for me.

I assume you mean the HTML5 <video> element.  I'm not even sure if the HTML5 standard has been finalised yet...
Anyway, Firefox 3.5 added support for the <video> element, but they will probably never add H.264 decoding (required for Youtube to work with the <video> tag).

I expect Google is going to leverage off IE's lack of support for the <video> tag - something like "to see this video download Chrome frame!".

MysterySword Wrote:I do think HTML5 is better than Flash. It uses like 20% less CPU, and doesn't use up as much memory. Not to mention the Adobe coders for Flash are lazy. They left a bug that they knew about in Flash for 16 months.

Perhaps, I guess this just offloads the task to the browser developers though.  You mean that the <video> tag uses 20% less CPU than the Flash decoder?

This is a good read regarding this issue...


http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

(This post was last modified: 23/02/2010 07:05 PM by Assassinator.)

Not really this issue exactly.  Well at least situations people are speculating about, such as Youtube switching to HTML5 only.
I also wonder how many people actually think Flash is slow...