YouTube, Vimeo Ditching Flash for HTML5

In others news, execs at Adobe and involuntarily spit their morning coffee all over their screens.

Hmmmm, the only two browsers I use are Opera and, if I have to, Firefox. I can understand them leaving out Opera, with roughly 2% market share, but Firefox? While including Safari? Seems strange to me.

'bout time we kicked the outdated software to the curb. Adobe's decided it's not going to update it, and after years of complaining still hasn't even managed to get a 64 bit version out. If a company doesn't listen to its customers, it's doomed to be replaced.

Youtube better support Firefox 3.6 at least. Firefox is no minority any more.

OMFG! I'm so excited for this. I run a +20mb/s connection and I used to not be able to watch HD videos on youtube (or regular tbh. SOOOO SLOW!). Now, HTML5 instantly loads. It's amazing. Thank you, finally. No longer having to wait for youtube videos to load.

It's about time. Flash is a joke, Adobe has grown way to complacent about quality of their products. Need more stuff like this and Silverlight.

What if I don't want to install stupid google chrome frame into internet explorer???

Google's starting to become more like MS in the 90's all the time!

Firefox 3.6 came out today and it supports HTML5. Havent tried it yet but im guessing it works. Anyone give it a try yet?

The odd choice in browser support is due to each browser's choice in which HTML5 video type they wanted to support. You have a choice between Vorbis and H.264 for HTML5 video. Chrome and Safari support H.264. Firefox and Opera support Vorbis. There's nothing stopping anybody from supporting BOTH formats at the same time, on either side, it's mostly a matter of Firefox and Opera not wanting to pay the licensing fees required for an H.264 decoder, and Google and Apple don't trust that Vorbis isn't subject to submarine patents which could bite them in the ass in the future (which I think is ridiculous, because H.264 could potentially have the same problem). So for the moment there is a rift in HTML5 video, but at least it's only a small rift which I think will get worked out sooner rather than later.

I thought the new Firefox 3.6 supported that....

Video in Opera is hit and miss, although to be honest it is the Alpha build so I can imagine its still a bit buggy.

10.5 Aplha

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/

adobe flash is responsible for a lot of problems, i am happy to see it being replaced

HTML5 doesn't require additional software installation for playback... but it doesn't playback at all on Firefox, one of the most popular web browsers available?? At least at the moment that doesn't sound all that "special", especially in comparison to what's already available through flash.

Then again I know nothing of the potential benefits of HTML5 video content, perhaps in terms of performance/efficiency? Flash has always been a bit buggy for me in this regard.

apparently you don't read the articles on your own site

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/f [...] ,9490.html

states that the new firefox 3.6 supports it.

Yeah, Firefox 3.6 supports HTML5...

youtube is owned by google.....

supporting chrome and not firefox, didn't see that one coming....

Finally this pond scum is being scraped off the Internet.

Good riddance! Now if we can also do away with that slow, ancient resource hog called Adobe Reader I'll be jumping for joy.

I cannot believe the number of comments about this article that are just plain daft.

The problem is NOT that Youtube and Vimeo "aren't supporting" Firefox or Opera or IE8. If anything, it's the other way around. Youtube and Vimeo are upgrading to the new web standards that are coming down the pipeline. Chrome and Safari have already updated their browsers to support the new technology, while Firefox (yes, I realize 3.6 now supports it, but this is for comparison sake with previous comments made) implemented a different format of the new standards that doesn't work with the approach that Youtube and Vimeo took. While all the companies involved on both sides are, let's face it, JUGGERNAUTS, it will be content PROVIDERS who win the day, and the browsers are the ones who should be adapting their approach. People can always change browsers to a different one that works, but you can't just switch to another video streaming site, the reason being the existing sites already have all the content in place, whereas any alternative won't.

But when I read on different sites it seems like Opera does support HTML5. Now I'm really confused.

@xaios: initially, the HTML5 draft explicitly recommended Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis (as being patent-unencumbered, free of charge to implement, open source in the public domain - you can't make it more free than that).

Due to opposition from Nokia and Apple, these were removed. Current HTML5 draft doesn't define a codec nor a container format, but you can define several streams if one doesn't work.

the current solution is thus:
- Safari ships with a built-in H.264 and AAC decoder, which are under license. It will only decode these formats. Safari ships on Mac and Windows.
- Chrome ships with Theora, Ogg, H.264 and AAC decoders built-in, and will decode all of them; H.264 and AAC are under license. Chrome ships on Mac, Windows and Linux, but is still beta on the *NIX OSes.
- Firefox ships with Theora and Vorbis, as does Chromium (the open source version of Chrome), which are license-free. It ships on pretty much any platform you may think of, and mobile editions also support Ogg and Theora.
- Opera still has this feature in beta.

A solution under consideration by most browser makers is to rely upon the video platform provided by the OS (ActiveX/Media Player on Windows, Quicktime on Mac, gstreamer,xine,mplayer etc. on Linux) to do the actual decoding, but since this is still very much in flux, currently they simply provide their internal video interfaces.

Ideally, all browsers (including free ones) will be able to decode any format (including those under license) provided a codec for it (either a system one or an internal one) is installed.

If x264 (the Free H.264 implementation) wasn't illegal in some countries, Firefox would support H.264. Please also note that recent Theora encoders are getting very close to H.264's encoding quality/compression (previously, some tests made with a faulty version of Theora created washed out video with a high bitrate), and that Theora was designed so that an encoder improvement may not require a decoder modification or specific implementation (this is what bit MP3 in the arse, for those of you who remember when LAME' Variable Bitrate caused quite a stir).

"In others news, execs at Adobe and involuntarily spit their morning coffee all over their screens."


hahahahahahahahahahahaha

@mitch074: x264 ilegal? Where?

Can someone please shed light on the following..

What is the state of play now, with chipsets and graphics cards that claim to offer hardware acceleration for HD content? Does this means that these alternative formats are going to run transparently on this hardware? Many thanks.

wow really fast, little buffering on my connection

Hmmm... And this right after I got an ion based Netbook to take advantage of Adobe's GPU optimization.

I'll admit that the GPU is the first thing Adobe has done right in a decade, but I'm a bit ticked right now as there is no GPU suport in HTML5.