Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/19/2010, 3:16 PM
Anyone have any idea what the < video > tag does for us that we couldn't already do with the < embed > tag 10 years ago? I was including video clips inline in my web pages way back when. True, it did require that the visitor had the appropriate player plugin installed, but it was easy to use something that most every system was capable of playing. For that matter it doesn't sound like there's going to be any standard built-in player for browsers using the new < video > tag for quite some time anyway.
Coursedesign wrote on 7/19/2010, 3:21 PM
Browsers with standard HTML5 built-in video players

Steve Mann wrote on 7/19/2010, 3:46 PM
First, HTML5 is *years* from ratification, so everything is preliminary.
<video> uses the video player built into the browser and <embed> brings in an external player - most often Flash.
Coursedesign wrote on 7/19/2010, 4:42 PM
The share of H.264 web video went from 35% to more than 55% in only 3 months, much thanks to the widespread realization that Flash is terrible for mobile video.

Because, unlike H.264, Flash video is not supported in hardware on any smartphone or tablet, battery consumption & CPU-utilization skyrocket.

On desktops this is of no concern of course, but mobile video is getting huge and nobody wants to lose tens of millions to hundreds of millions of viewers.

An easy out for many is to put H.264 on their web sites and serve it in HTML5 tags for those whose browser ID indicates they support it, and in a Flash wrapper for the rest.

The full ratification will probably take at least a year, but in the meantime it will be like "802.11n Draft" which was in very very widespread use before the standard was ratified fully.

wombat wrote on 7/19/2010, 8:58 PM
This sounds very promising, with potential for a return to simplicity, choice and flexibility with streaming media.
Chienworks wrote on 7/20/2010, 4:09 AM
It seems though that support for built-in players is probably going to be spottier than support for external players. At least with external players i can choose which ones i want to install. What if my browser vendor doesn't make particular codecs available? Will there be a procedure for installing 3rd party codecs just so that i can watch the content i want to see? And if that's the case then it's not really any different or any improvement over what we've already got.

I suppose part of my grumpiness is that in my experience, streaming video just plain doesn't work. I always preferred downloadable because then i could get the whole file first and watch it in a functional player. Streaming files halt and skip all the time. I was able to get around that for a while by clicking Pause as soon as the download started and waiting until it was complete before playing it. Often though even after a complete pre-download, the streaming player still has fits and won't play smoothly. I've also seen the emergence of several players that stop downloading when paused, which makes the whole process pointless.

It's so bad from what i've seen that i don't understand why streaming exists at all. Watching streaming videos, especially in flash, is pretty much worthless.
Jay Gladwell wrote on 7/20/2010, 5:46 AM

"... in my experience, streaming video just plain doesn't work. I always preferred downloadable because then i could get the whole file first and watch it in a functional player. Streaming files halt and skip all the time. I was able to get around that for a while by clicking Pause as soon as the download started and waiting until it was complete before playing it. Often though even after a complete pre-download, the streaming player still has fits and won't play smoothly."

Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I was beginning to think it was just me.

No one has been able, so far, to convince me that the delivery of web video has progressed rather than regressed, insofar as technical innovations are concerned. A perfect example is Kelly's observation: "I've also seen the emergence of several players that stop downloading when paused, which makes the whole process pointless." What's the point?