<archive for="Youtube">

YouTube introduces HTML5 powered videos

YouTube announced today that they are introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported video player.

The player has some limitations: It doesn’t support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and only works in browsers that support both the video tag and h.264 encoding (Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer using ChromeFrame).

To try it out, go to the HTML5 page via TestTube or visit this page and join the HTML5 Beta.

Watch YouTube videos without Flash in HTML5

Sometimes there’s no way for me to watch Youtube videos on Ubuntu. And I have a few problems on Windows too. Flash can give you a lot of headaches, most of the times because CPU usage or crashes. Fortunately the Neosmart guys created a solution to watch Youtube videos taking advantage of the video support in HTML 5.

The status of the video tag

The video element colud allow us to include a video or movie without the need of a plugin such as Adobe Flash, which seems to be the de facto standard nowadays. But one of the main problems for a massive implementation is the lack of an agreement for a common video codec on all browsers.

The two most popular candidates seem to be Ogg Theora (open source) and H.264 (proprietary) but…

  • Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora because of the lack of hardware support and patent issues.
  • Google implemented both options in Chrome but, due to licensing issues, cannot allow the use of the H.264 codec to third-party applications and stated that they believe Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.
  • Opera won’t implement H.264 because of the license costs.
  • Mozilla stands in the same place as Opera, due to the costs to downstream distributors.
  • Microsoft has not yet commented about the issue.

So, what could be the future of the video implementation? Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, sees to possible solutions:

1. Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple’s concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

2. The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

It seems that, for now, there’s no chance for a standard solution. For the time being, we can see some beta implementations of the video tag in sites like Dailymotion or Youtube, each with their own approach to the subject.