11/21/2011 08:44:00 PM
dannzfay
YouTube has been working on its HTML5 video player for more than a year now, but the project has remained mainly experimental. Still, the latest versions now seem rather complete and on par, feature wise, with the regular Flash-based player.
As Google Operating System noted, the HTML5 player is pretty much ready to take over the Flash based one. That said, that probably won't happen any time soon.
Google could decide to start advertising the HTML5 version to users and start offering them the option to switch, but that depends on how stable the player and, importantly, how well browsers out there handle it.
The HTML5 YouTube player is available as an experiment. If you decide to join, all YouTube videos will be streamed via HTML5, except the ones with ads. Of course, whether this works or not depends on your browser.
But if you're using a fairly modern browser there should be no problem. You can always leave the HTML5 experiment, of course.
The HTML5 player looks rather well, in fact, in some respects, it looks better than the Flash based one. It also offers the same functionality, all of the controls are there, you can enable subtitles (close captioning) and there's even full screen support in some browsers.
What's more, you'll also be able to get videos streamed in WebM, Google's open source video format, rather than the usual h.264. WebM videos are available in 480p and even 1080p versions on YouTube, depending on the original resolution of the video.
Google made a lot of noise last year with the release of the WebM video format and it's always been a big proponent of HTML5. But things haven't really changed in the meantime. The HTML5 player is a lot better, but it doesn't seem like YouTube plans to push it to users any time soon.
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3 comments:
I would love to see this option.
I like the new look of the JW Player is faster is better and my slow computer with crappy video card will not got slow anymore, nice job you guys! youtube html5 player
Awesome, very comprehensive review. I'm thinking about learning HTML5. I'm seeing more and more job/freelance listings asking for html5 media playerknowledge and so along with reading some of the online references you listed, I'm going to have to pick up the book as well. Really appreciated the chapter breakdowns.
Thank you for the link. :).Interesting to read.You can embed any audio fromyoutube html5 player you can upload any audio and then grab the embed code of that audio and embed it anywhere.
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