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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.
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.
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
Only uses ~8% CPU on safari vs ~30% for the same video through the safari flash plugin.
Sigger than your average
No, it doesn't work on Firefox, as an update to the blog post points out. Youtube won't supply video in a format Firefox supports (and it only supports one - Theora). I believe there is work being done to allow Firefox to use other codecs if you have them installed (as Webkit does - it works for me using Epiphany), at which point this could potentially work on Firefox.
the page itself says that firefox doesn't support mp4 videos in HTML5 due to some license restrictions.
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.
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.
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