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Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube
An anonymous reader writes "Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."
Yes, when video sites change, we can say goodbye to flash, because nobody uses Flash for navigation, casual online games, interactive information displays, or google maps street view...we have a long ways until we can say goodbye to Flash
On OS X this has been available for ages, switchs all youtube videos to HTML5 and is extensible for other placse like Dailymotion. http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
The biggest problem isn't support for , but common support for major video formats. Seems there's no codec supported by all browsers anytime soon.
I'm waiting for "HTML5VideoBlock" to go along with FlashBlock, because it won't take long for irritating adverts to start using the option. To be honest, I'm surprised it hasn't started already...
Anytime you submit a story and one of your sentences starts with "Personally,", leave it out. We don't care.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Now will we be able to get hardware video acceleration through VDPAU, etc so that I can play it on my Zotac ION media center or low power laptop?
because nobody uses Flash for [list of uses of flash]
By way of anal extraction, I arrive at the conclusion that 90% of the eyeball wall time spent looking at flash is spent looking at videos.
(89% of those 90% being youtube + google video, another 0.5% being redtube).
Once we get to HTML5 video being popular, flash will become much more a niche thing. There's a long way between "niche" and "dead", but I don't know that we need to cross that gap. Heck, I still see Java applets around (for Rubik's Cube animations; I think that's one niche where they're used well).
On the other hand, if we RTFS:
The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported
Note that IE is not on the list. Make an educated guess about the implications for the penetration of the video tag.
Yep, I recently discovered this myself. Unfortunately (as with this clever HTML5 hack), it only supports YouTube, so videos on other sites still require Flash.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Today Webconverger released with an HTML5 video enabled build today: http://webconverger.org/blog/entry/5.7_with_Firefox_3.5/
The plan is once HTML5 video becomes prevalent, the integrated proprietary flash player will be dropped. http://webconverger.org/adobe/
I just tried it with FF 3.5.5 (on Linux), and got nothing but a non-working clone of the YouTube player. It's been the same story with YouTube's HTML5 demo for some time as well.
If it's a windows-only thing, or Chrome-only, then it's not good enough to replace Flash yet.
It's not so much the incompatibilities (although support for non x86-32 platforms has always been very poor on Linux), but the inefficiencies. There's *no* reason for a 320x240 web video to bring a modern system to its knees (GPU acceleration or not).
Even VLC's somewhat buggy FLV implementation plays flash videos with 1/10 the CPU cycles that the flash player does.
Flash's performance is borderline acceptable on Windows, although the mac version (PPC especially!) is appallingly bad.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If video content is served directly in a video tag, it will be just as easy to download as images on a web page. Content providers know this and won't use the video tag.
One reason content providers use Flash instead of just letting you download the video file is that Flash (ostensibly) prevents you from downloading the video. While it's true that there are plug-ins for Firefox to let you download Flash videos, the people who use them are a small minority. Even with the video tag, Flash will still be widely used to "protect" the content.
I void warranties.
Only uses ~8% CPU on safari vs ~30% for the same video through the safari flash plugin.
Sigger than your average
You could try minitube, a native Youtube client. You don't even need to have the stupid Flash Player installed to use it, so it doesn't eat more CPU than any other video player.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
the page itself says that firefox doesn't support mp4 videos in HTML5 due to some license restrictions.
Same here. I use Unplug (Firefox plugin) to download the video, and then I use VLC to watch it.
Unplug doesn't work with some of the less popular video sites, but it does work with YouTube. If somebody thinks they're being clever by letting someone other than YouTube host their video, then I probably didn't want to watch it anyway.
By all means, someone explain to me why the <Video> tag is in any way better than the <Embed> tag that's existed for 1.4.5 years now, and why it's going to rescue the world from Flash, which took over because people decided they didn't want to use <Embed> anymore...
I'll just hold my breath...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What OS is this on? I've had similar results under Windows, but under Linux it's quite common for flash to completely lock up my browser, about once a day.
View flash videos on VLC.
Personally, I prefer to have the browser load such video in an external player that treats it like streaming media, though stability isn't my reason. I like having the full controls of the external player available and I like being able to easily resize the window that plays the video.
Then you will love this. Let the flash video load and pause it at the beginning. Then fire up the terminal and type:
vlc /tmp/Flash*
It works with at least vimeo and youtube.
Same here. I hate Flash. It's pointless. Between AJAX, PHP, and CSS, there's very little Flash offers beyond video provision.
Yes, Flash does animation. As long as it does animation, Fine. When they began expanding ActionScript because all the Lingo programmers needed a home, that's when it went off the rails, and that was a long time ago.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
How is JavaScript + the canvas element not a free, open replacement for Flash?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The way to view the video is to use an external site (NeoSmart's site to be precise) to find the MP4 on Google's servers and display it using the video tag. All the script does is add a link to the YouTube page that redirects you to NeoSmart's viewer.
A far better solution would be something like YouTube Without Flash Auto or YouTube Perfect, both of which (among other features) locate the MP4 client-side and present the video right in the YouTube page using whatever plugin you assigned to play MP4 files. If this can be pulled off without involving any external sites, I see no reason that a conversion to HTML5 video tags can't be done the same way.
Disclaimer: using those scripts to view YouTube outside of the Flash player violates the ToS.
You asked for it...
Playing video in an embed tag requires the user to have a platform-specific plugin installed. The user interface you get depends on the specific plugin used and can only be customized in a plugin-specific way. The Javascript API offered by the player is also plugin-specific and probably not as useful as the standard API provided by the video tag. Loading the plugin will often freeze the user's browser for several seconds and/or cause crashes. Plugins don't play nice with CSS opacity and z-order and are often buggy with respect to positioning, resizing, full-page zoom, and DOM manipulation. New advanced CSS features like transforms and animation are not likely to play nice with plugins either.
Flash took over from embed because it provided a customizable UI, consistent API, workable fullscreen mode, and reliable codec support. The video tag has the first two of these and is likely to get fullscreen support soon. Unfortunately codec support is a sticking point...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I have encountered many, many people who think that anything running at HD resolutions is HD. Even in the geek community. And it seems very difficult to convince them otherwise. Many seem convinced that any video that is playing back at 1080 lines is utilising "full HD resolution", even if the source is a 360x240 video that's been maximised. Even Youtube's "720p" video is so compressed the artifacts are plainly visible, yet because it's 720 lines and is activated by clicking an "HD" button, pundits seem to think that it's high definition video.
As for whether he is blind or mistaken, realise - most people with HD res screens still have never seen HD video up close and personal, thus it's easy to understand why a scaled, interlaced, lossy video might look "pixel perfect" to them compared to other traditional sources like XVID dvd rips or even DVDs. For instance, most people with an HD screen don't actually have a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive. And even of those with a Blu-ray drive (its coming standard more frequently thesedays) many have never actually gone out and bought a Bluray title and chucked it in.
If any of you readers fall into this category (not actually having seen real HD video playback up close), don't worry - you're not at all alone. There's an easy solution:
1. Head over to trailers.apple.com and download a decent 1080p HD trailer. Here's a nice one: http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/2012/hd/
2. Start saving for the Bluray drive you now simply MUST have.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
They can also go out and spend $50 for a pair of rabbit-ears and look at an OTA (Over-the-Air) 1080 hi-def signal, and compare it to the crappy compressed signal their cable or satellite provider sends them.
They should check, as you said, to make sure the original source was also hi-def and hasn't been up-scaled. As an example, try David Letterman on CBS - it's 1080i in many areas, and it looks SO different from older canned stuff, etc.
Then there are all the people who bought HD TVs that can't do more than 720 lines, but they're "1080p compatible" - because they downsample.
And then you have the problem of LCDs suffering from uneven luminance along the vertical axis because of the way that the crystals block the backlight, with more light leaking around pixels that are below eye level.
Or the suckers who bought 120hz or 240hz LCDs - not realizing that the picture is interpolated between 60hz source frames, and HAS to be distorted. They're convinced by the in-store demo disk. They'd be much better off buying a 600hz plasma TV (it doesn't interpolate between source frames - just refreshes the screen 600x a second. The entire frame is updated in 1/600 of a second, as opposed to 1/60 (or 1/30) of a second for conventional systems).
Here's a novel idea: She could try paying for music. (A radical idea, I know.)
You can buy DRM free MP3s from Amazon.com -- Yes, it works with linux.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html
Find what you want on youtube, then go buy it. (Isn't this what all the pro-pirates claim they do anyhow?)
If you're too poor to afford the 89 cents, you could have her dig through some indie music instead.
Required reading for internet skeptics