01.21
Today at vimeo there was a blog post that stated that vimeo had launch a new video player via html 5 support that did not use the flash player. For the most of only a few of the newest browsers are supporting html5 so there was a few people complaining that they could not see it working. But the thing that bothered me was the general resentment people had towards the current flash based video player. Now I don’t know about you, but the flash video player that vimeo currently uses was the thing that interested me the most about vimeo. Strangely, I was the first person to post a comment in support of the current flash player which caused a few people to replay with negative remarks. The part of that being “strange” was the blog post was immediately removed right after that even though there was a fairly large number of comments in that blog post. Was the removal due to the large amount of flash bashing? or perhaps due to complications that may arise from insinuating that they would be doping the flash based video player in the near future? I can’t really tell you one way or the other, but this is a disturbing trend that I’m seeing more and more as fanatics state that html 5 will in some way be the death to flash.
Edit: So it would look that the blog post is still there, but because of some bug it not showing up all the time.
Flash platform is my favorite technology to work with, but if HTML5 is the new better way to create web content, then I’ll switch… Technology come and go, there is nothing wrong with that.
But yeah it’s kind of sad.
Since vimeo has positioned itself as a more high end video site, so I doubt they will drop Flash any time in the near future (next 5+ years). Adobe is continuing to push video forward in Flash, while HTML5 video tag still can’t do full screen. HTML5 video is similar to Flash Player 6 video in terms of features and in the slow nature of updating across all browsers, I don’t ever see it catching up. Plugins will always have an edge over browsers because of how fast new features can be included into plugins.
Also many complain about Flash video taking up too many CPU cycles, but I’ve seen a lot of people disappointed that the speed is no better or at times worst in the browser. Once some people test it out they realize there isn’t a magic speed increase that some were expecting. Also with Flash Player 10.1, Adobe is introducing video hardware acceleration, which would give a huge performance boost when it comes to video.
Meanwhile, Internet Explorer doesn’t support video tag at all. Perhaps in IE9? At which we will have to wait another 5 years for the majority of IE users to upgrade, seeing how IE6 users are still lingering.
Also another problem with HTML5 video tag is the lack of codec standard. Both Firefox and Opera support the HTML5 video tag, but aren’t supported by vimeo because they don’t come with the h.264 codec, meaning vimeo would have to re-encode all of their videos in Theora. This would be incredibly expensive move with little benefit.
Where I do see HTML5 video tag being used is a fall back for mobile that don’t have a Flash plugin, but once again all smartphone companies, except for Apple & the iPhone should be getting Flash 10.1 sometime this year.
I was thinking the EXACT same thing when I saw the post about YouTube offering an HTML5 player as well (http://bit.ly/4vktcl). It’s the same ole garbage spewing idiocracy that we saw when everyone thought the term AJAX == “Flash Killer”. You just cant fix stupid
I don’t know if other people have this problem, but when I see Vimeo videos that are embedded in other sites, if I’m opening tabs left and right, any page that has a vimeo video, if I don’t watch / initiate that video it right away, that video will not play 2 minutes later when I finally get back around to that page in it’s tab. It just sits there and spins it’s wheels. Seems to be telling me, “hey, you opened this page with the embedded video, you gotta use it or lose it.” That’s how the finnicky player is. I don’t like it for that reason. Youtube vids don’t have that problem. Maybe it’s a firefox thing, maybe it’s a Flash-in-Firefox on Windowsthing. I don’t know, but if HTML5 vids play better, cool!
But it can be potentially incredibly expensive to NOT re-encode in Theora. The problem is that h.264 is patented and while the use restrictions on it have been fairly liberal thus far, much as mp3 has been, there’s no reason why the patent holders can’t change the licensing deal and start demanding royalties. And with h.264 kind of becoming the de-facto, why would they not?
Of course, if they were to go with theora for html5 video tags they can still serve up an alternative flash version for older brows– oh wai, Flash doesn’t natively support ogg. Way to embrace the open web Adobe!
This blows, I am a Flash Developer and I think flash will be the future universal platform for delivering interactive content. Just wait until Adobe figures a way out to bring flash
to mobile devices then is going to be on. I’ll be saying. I told you so.
-Shaqtus
Flash platform is my favorite technology to work with, but if HTML5 is the new better way to create web content, then I’ll switch… Technology come and go, there is nothing wrong with that.
But yeah it’s kind of sad.
But it can be potentially incredibly expensive to NOT re-encode in Theora. The problem is that h.264 is patented and while the use restrictions on it have been fairly liberal thus far, much as mp3 has been, there’s no reason why the patent holders can’t change the licensing deal and start demanding royalties. And with h.264 kind of becoming the de-facto, why would they not?
Of course, if they were to go with theora for html5 video tags they can still serve up an alternative flash version for older brows– oh wai, Flash doesn’t natively support ogg. Way to embrace the open web Adobe!