I LOVE the idea of without Flash and a lot of the HTML5 stuff coming. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Adobe fan and love Flash but it’s gotten bulky with video. Plus Mobile smartphones are taking over and I use my Blackberry for everything and HATE that I can’t watch video and stuff just because Flash isn’t supported. Video has become to much of a basic thing and needs to be supported across all platforms especially mobile devices. With the new Sprint HTC Evo coming with an HD Screen, HDMI port and a lot of other media intense options we need to be able as web designers and web developers to easily incorporate video into the layout

just my two cents…

This seems to be a good example of standards vs freedom. Why set a codec standard in stone, when some independent party might create the next great thing? I think setting a standard of codec would limit innovation in that field.

Flash will be on all mobile devices except for Apple devices. Besides, I think people are quite used to installing plug-ins and it shows because of the number of machines that have Flash installed. Personally I don’t think video is Html “business”. Yes, standardizing on the tag is Html business and if they (and browser makers) can get that straight it will be great but even today different browsers support different object tags.

Vimeo does not do Ogg (as of yet) and for websites like YouTube, Vimeo and ExposureRoom it means double the number of encodes and double the disk space – to what benefit? I have yet to hear any real benefit about Html 5 video and believe me, not installing a plug-in is not one of them. If that were the case then YouTube wouldn’t be so popular or online video for that matter wouldn’t be so popular.

There are many areas that Html needs fixing and many ways in which Html can be enhanced. Video is just not that big a pain. In fact it’s not a pain at all but many other (missing) things are a pain and I’d rather see those things fixed/addressed.

And we know that each browser maker will try and out do or deviate from the others so in the end the user/consumer is always going to get the short end of the stick no matter what.

Bruce wrote recently about the What are the Business Benefits of HTML5 video so I suggest you have a read as he mentions some of your concerns.

@TomOx – There are several easy to use convertors for the average user to create OGG videos. Also the average user wouldn’t really be encoding a video at all but more likely uploading to YouTube or Vimeo, who as we see from the article are now starting to cater for HTML5 video.

@Conor – Thanks for the link. The 2015 issue still looms large though. If I was a browser maker would I want to have to find an extra $5m a year to have a certain codec work in my browser or would I use an open source version?

We have to remember that this version of HTML is an opportunity to change things and do it better, so it’s important we get it right rather than being stung in 5 years time.

One other quick item to note is that with the recent growth in the mobile internet market, hardware acceleration for video playback is very important. Hardware acceleration for OGG doesn’t exist, to my knowledge. This is why Apple, and Google are pushing h.264.

Html 5 is more than just video and I think people are getting the wrong impression about Html 5 because all they see/hear is video, which is too bad, because it’s the least important part of Html 5.

Html 5 video – what’ so great about it? As a publisher I can tell you what I see looming over our heads. Since the video player is not the same in every browser you can expect different performance by different browsers/players on different operating systems. For example videos that play fine on MAC Safari (in their Html 5 video player) don’t work the same on PC Safari. The same video played in Chrome behaves differently and of course Firefox not at all. So we’re making a lot of progress?

What Flash gives us (and the viewer mind you) is an abstraction from all this. We are assured that if a video played in a certain browser and OS, it would play perfectly on any browser and OS (at least the platforms we care about).

The inconsistency in performance between browser players and the lack of support of H.264 by Firefox is a huge nightmare for us. Already we have 4 versions for every video uploaded (to suit different bandwidths and devices) and are planning a total of 6-7. Now, not only will we require double that number (because of Ogg-Theora) for each video uploaded but we’ll have to deal with the inconsistencies across browser players to boot.

Given a choice between all the extra encoding, disk space and inconsistencies in video quality (between H.264 and Theora) and the inconsistencies across browser players and the support nightmare that that will cause…

Flash versus Html 5 Video versus Windows Media/Quick Time

BROGGCAST.com, has the highest HTML5 support and reach (with Chrome Frame compatibility), and not one mention in the news.

What is obvious, is the media is not going to declare the winner to OGG, right in front of everyone’s face.