HTML5 Video

Lately it seems like there's been a lot of buzz surrounding HTML5 video.  YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion have already begun offering HTML5 alternatives to their standard Flash players. Brightcove just announced seamless HTML5 fallback for devices that don't have Flash installed as well as some new native HTML5 templates to boot.  Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer team just announced that the next generation of their browser will support HTML5 video.  At Visible Measures, we just announced measurement support for HTML5 video.  That last item kept me busy most of the week, running around testing out HTML5 videos on just about every OS, browser, smart phone and mobile device I could find around our office.  Here are a few of my thoughts about the experience...

First off, why all the buzz about HTML5 now?  The major publishers I mentioned have been offering HTML5 video for months and every browser besides IE has had support for HTML5 for some time as well.  My guess is that the driving force behind this recent push is Apple's new iPad.  Since Apple has pretty much guaranteed that Flash will never see the light of day on the iPad, publishers have been scrambling to offer alternative solutions for delivering their content.  The thing is, when your business depends on people watching your videos, a big white space with a blue Lego doesn't make you any money.  In this case Apple forced publishers' hands and left HTML5 as the only solution for delivering that content to the iPad.  So as much as I dislike the iPhone and iPad in general, props to Apple for giving the internet a huge kick in the pants on this issue.

The next thing you'll notice about HTML5 video is that it's not really standardized yet.  Open source browers such as Firefox and Opera only support the open source Ogg Theora codec for video playback.  It's no surprise Apple only supports their own H.264 codec for HTML5 video in Safari.  Google's Chrome technically supports both codecs, but given that YouTube currently only serves up H.264 video it certainly feels like they've thrown their weight behind Apple on this one.  This seems unfortunate to me because people have essentially traded one proprietary format (Flash) for another which is potentially worse.

Beyond the obvious codec differences, I was surprised to see how much variation there was between each browser's DOM support for the <video> element.  A lot of events and properties seem to be missing in both Firefox and Safari.  Chrome seems to have the best support so far, but I was only testing a limited subset of the API.  One place where I was really surpised to see no HTML5 video support at all, was on my DROID.  I guess those of you with Android devices will have to keep your fingers crossed for Flash Player 10.1 sometime in the near future.

One of the more disappointing aspects of HTML5 video is that under the hood, it's not very sexy.  If you want anything other than the standard browser controls on your player, you're going to need lots of JavaScript, CSS and SVG to make it look pretty.  The lack of consistent JavaScript APIs across browsers means that this is not the kind of thing you're going to want to throw together without using some sort of cross-browser library.  All of this extra baggage is also hard to carry around if you want to share your video on another site.  A lot of social networks don't allow you to embed these things on their sites and like it or not, the good ol' <object> and <embed> tags everyone uses for Flash usually just work.  Try pasting your JavaScript backed video player into MySpace and see how quickly it gets stripped out.  This is why all of those video sites I mentioned at the top of this post are still syndicating their Flash players when you click on the 'embed' link, even if you're watching an HTML5 video.

The last observation I'd like to share is this: I don't think Flash is going away anytime soon.  A lot of people have been trumpeting HTML5 as a Flash killer lately and I don't think that's even remotely true.  Apple has pretty much killed the possibility of Flash on their mobile devices, but nobody else is following them.  Flash Player 10.1 will bring Flash support to a huge segment of the smart phone market, including devices running Android, WebOS, Blackberry and more.  Time will tell if Flash on these devices can actually perform well enough to be useful, but phones are constantly getting faster and so is Flash.  And while people are showing that you can do some pretty awesome stuff with HTML5 and JavaScript, in my opinion Flash and ActionScript are still infinitely easier to work with when it comes to rich internet applications.