Youtube And Vimeo Using HTML 5 At The Expense Of Flash
YouTube have announced in the last few days that it will support a new prototype player that uses HTML 5. Other video websites like Vimeo are getting in on the act also, at the expense of using Adobe’s Flash player. The Adobe Flash is currently the standard method for delivering multimedia content and video streams over the net, capturing something like 99% of internet users. The HTML5 standard will allow a similar Flash videos experience but without the need for a seperate plugin or buffering.The prototype YouTube HTML5 player can be seen here, whilst the Vimeo verion can be enabled by pressing the “switch to HTML5 player” link under its videos. Both players need Chrome, Safari, and the ChromeFrame plugin for Internet Explorer to run.
For streaming video, the big advantage of HTML 5 is that it includes video as a supported tag. According to proponents, this allows simplified coding, and the ability to jump in and out of video streams at various places without the need for buffering.
This being the case, the first uses of HTML 5.0 are little more than prototypes. “Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations,” YouTube revealed in its blog that:- “HTML5 on YouTube doesn’t support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video (currently that means Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer). We will be expanding the capabilities of the player in the future, so get ready for new and improved versions in the months to come.”
Over at the Vimeo blog, they said that the new player won’t work on all Vimeo videos – although about 90 percent are supported – and the HTML 5.0 player is only enabled on videos viewed directly from the Vimeo site. As of Thursday, the Vimeo HTML 5 player also could not play videos back in full-screen mode.
“The simple fact is right now h264 allows us the most flexibility to display on many devices and many players with the same file,’ Dougherty said. “When that changes, so will we.”
So why change from Flash? Whilst flash requires a lot of processing power, hence not being available on mobile phones, the new HTML5 player is a much sleeker beast.
Incoming TV searches:
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