The cpu time to re-encode all the videos on you tube is probably in the billions of hours by now. If it catches on and management supports it, then more codecs will be supported you can bet. It’s just easier to support it since they have 0 re-encoding work to do and it’s all front end changes. The reason that you tube didn’t release the ‘open’ codec is cause they already have all their video in h264 format. In order to join the beta, simply visit this page and click “Join the HTML5 beta” you can click it again to leave the beta version. Playing the A Night Like This video in Flash 10 on Ubuntu eats about 68% (!) of my quad-core processor, whereas the HTML5 version sticks at about 12-20%. Of course, there is also a major, major advantage in using the HTML5 version: processor usage. It’s really quite startling to compare the Flash version of a video to the HTML5/h264 version (I suggest trying it out on this one – isn’t it great I can use OSNews to subtly promote my favourite music?). They are ridiculously blocky on my setup (Chrome 4.0 on Ubuntu 9.10), giving me the feeling I’m back in 1999. What I do not find acceptable, however, is the abysmal video quality of videos played using the HTML5 version. This being in beta stage, these are acceptable shortcomings. It also won’t play videos with annotations, advertisements, or captions for those videos, it will switch back to the Flash player. YouTube using h264 is just one of the limitations of the HTML5 version of YouTube.
Since the original feature request stressed using open standards (i.e., Theora), Google still has some way to go. Chrome and Safari both do, but Firefox and Opera only support Theora. Theora supposedly isn’t as good as h264 (note the supposedly, I hear conflicting statements on that one), but h264 is a licensing nightmare, so not all browsers support it. HTML5 doesn’t specify the codec to be used with the video tag, leading to a situation where everybody’s debating either Theora or h264. All modern browsers support the HTML5 audio and video tags (except Internet Explorer), but sadly, that doesn’t mean the new HTML5 YouTube beta will work on all of those browsers. Sadly, video quality needs a lot of work, and in spite of the original feature request, it’s using h264 instead of Theora.Īs most of you will know by now, HTML5 includes the video and audio tags, which allow you to embed video and audio files in your HTML document as if they were images. Apparently, a lot of people want a version of YouTube that doesn’t depend on Flash (me being one of them), and now Google has honoured their request with the HTML5 YouTube beta. Only a few days ago, we discussed the most popular YouTube feature request: HTML5 video support.
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