YouTube Introduces Flash-free Videos

If you’re on a browser that supports it (at the moment, Chrome and Safari), YouTube has a beta version of their site that uses the HTML5 “video” tag and h.264 video to accomplish what they, to this point, had only been able to accommodate using Flash. As someone who runs into problems fairly frequently with Flash in Safari, it’d be great to one day lose the plug-in entirely.

Again, not everybody will be able to use this right away, and certain video features (ads, comments) aren’t working, but it’s pretty amazing that this day has come. While Flash will be, far and away, the client-side rich media technology of choice for years to come, what do you think YouTube means to Flash in terms of adoption and daily use?

From: Introducing YouTube HTML5 Supported Videos

posted by Dan Nordquist on January 21st, 2010 at 3:08 pm Permanent link to this post

4 Responses to “YouTube Introduces Flash-free Videos”

Bobby Marko

January 21, 2010 at 4:02 pm

Now if only browser vendors could all agree on a single codec so all the browsers can join the party with a single video file – preferably the open source route Firefox is taking with OGG.

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- Dan Nordquist
  
  January 21, 2010 at 4:59 pm
  
  It seems that you can use video with two source elements in it – if the browser comes across a source it doesn’t support, it should skip to the first one it does. (Browsers that support more than one specified source just use the first one they support.) So YouTube would just have to encode everything twice (or three times, if they’re not using h.264 for the Flash version).
  
  John Gruber has written about why Apple and Mozilla disagree on formats: http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/wee_bit_more_on_aac
  
  Reply
  - Bobby Marko
    
    January 22, 2010 at 9:49 am
    
    Plus if we’re going down the road of serving up multiple files you could provide a flash backup for browsers that don’t support the new html5 elements: http://henriksjokvist.net/archive/2009/2/using-the-html5-video-tag-with-a-flash-fallback
    
    I just can’t imagine how much work it would be for Youtube to re-encode all of their videos, and I don’t see Google putting in that work when they want people to use Chrome.
    
    Also, Vimeo joined the html5 party too: http://vimeo.com/blog:268
    
    Reply
Dan Nordquist

January 22, 2010 at 9:53 am

Vimeo isn’t far behind. And like YouTube’s, it’s h.264, so Firefox is excluded. What would it take for Firefox to support h.264? And where’s IE8 in all this?

http://www.vimeo.com/blog:268

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