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A Skeptical Comparison of HTML5 Video Playback To Flash
gollum123 writes "Think we'd all be better off if HTML5 could somehow instantly replace Flash overnight? Not necessarily, according to a set of comparisons from Jan Ozer of the Streaming Learning Center website, which found that while HTML5 did come out ahead in many respects, it wasn't exactly a clear winner. They did find that HTML5 clearly performed better than Flash 10 or 10.1 in Safari on a Mac, although the differences were less clear cut in Google Chrome or Firefox. On the other hand, Flash more than held its own on Windows, and Flash Player 10.1 was actually 58% more efficient than HTML5 in Google Chrome on the Windows system tested. As you may have deduced, one of the big factors accounting for that discrepancy is that Flash is able to take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration in Windows, while Adobe is effectively cut out of the loop on Mac."
gollum123 also links to additional tests indicating that Flash "does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows."
As soon as the video tag becomes popular implementations using the GPU will appear, and will not only work in Windows. We will be farther better off.
And if Google open sources the VP8 codec the just purchased, it will be even better.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
It's not really fair to compare a technology that is still being developed to others that are very well established. The big benefit of HTML5 is it's non-proprietary nature. Once the standard is adopted and applications are built around it these comparisons will look very different.
Performance is rather secondary. This is about standards and cross-platform compatibility. Flash is an atrocity in this regard, and the earlier it gets tossed out on the trash heap of computing history, the better.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So they're saying that when Flash isn't -doing- anything, it still sucks down 12% of the CPU. Yeah, that's awesome! Whoo!
They're also saying that With Flash using the GPU to the hilt, and HTML 5 not, they use about the same CPU.
Seriously, these are not impressive numbers.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Most people can't manage their own desktop, how they gonna manage their own risk?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't care if Flash is 50% faster than HTML5 video. I don't want the vulnerability-laden Flash on my primary OS just to watch a YouTube video. Period.
In the mean time, Mozilla has stated that they're unable to ship H.264 as part of Firefox. H.264 has patent and licensing issues associated with it.
Your choices are still 1) create content once for a ubiquitous platform available absolutely everywhere except Apple embedded devices (where Apple chooses for you that you don't have access to it), or 2) create content multiple times in multiple formats, falling back on browser sniffing and other skulduggery, plus having to test on a variety of different platforms, then going ahead and creating the #1 version anyway since there are still people you can't reach without this no matter how hard you try.
HTML5 is the right direction. But it is a long, long way from mature. There isn't a single ubiquitous codec even when your users support the fledgling standard otherwise. Until then, Flash is still the right choice for all but technical purists, both for video, and for absolutely everything else Flash offers (including feature domain HTML5 doesn't cover even in draft).
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
n the mean time, Mozilla has stated that they're unable to ship H.264 as part of Firefox
I wouldn't want them to. Why in the hell would any browser include a codec. What Mozilla and every other browser is supposed to do is not care about codecs and use what's installed on the user's computer. Place an option in the preferences menu, so you can choose between multiple installed options.
I don't want to choose my browser based on who has the most efficient codec. I want to choose it based on which browser gives me a better browsing experience. If I find a better codec that can do GPU acceleration, or whatever, I want to install it and have all my browsers be able to use it.
> It's just odd to compare two different tech stacks (which can do just about anything) by measuring their video playback performance.
It's the point of comparison because hardware acceleration DOES NOT WORK.
It doesn't work despite there meant a means to do so on both Linux and MacOS. Adobe continues to give same excuses while sandbagging.
Their Windows version probably isn't even living up to it's own potential in this regard.
Video playback performance is fixated on because it means the difference between being able to use an Atom or needing a 3Ghz or Quad Core machine.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In the mean time, Mozilla has stated that they're unable to ship H.264 as part of Firefox [mozillazine.org]. H.264 has patent and licensing issues associated with it.
Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP) instead of trying to include codecs in browsers? That's an option, at least, since most media players will decode h264.
Here's the main problem I have with this complaint: Ultimately, Flash is just being used as a 3rd party H264 media player anyway. By saying people should stay on Flash, you're basically saying, "Mozilla can't distribute H264 decoders and we can't ask people to install any 3rd party H264 decoders, so instead we're going to force everyone to install a particular 3rd party H264 decoder which is included in a sprawling 3rd-party plugin that only works well in Windows."
When you stop and think about it, it doesn't really make a ton of sense. Flash has worked as a stop-gap measure, but it really has never been a good way to handle things.
create content once for a ubiquitous platform available absolutely everywhere except Apple embedded devices
*sigh* If only it were that simple. Flash isn't on absolutely everything except Apple devices. It works pretty well in Windows. You can get it on Linux/BSD/etc, but some distros don't have it installed by default. Even on OSX, Flash is a buggy resource hog that crashes constantly, which is at least part of the reason why Jobs doesn't want it on his low-power devices. Non-Apple phones and embedded devices may or may not have Flash support.
Adobe tried to blame Apple for the poor performance of Flash on OSX, but if you read their description of the situation, it basically comes down to, "We chose to stick with Carbon (an old framework which Apple has basically been trying to obsolete, but keeping around for compatibility's sake) instead of switching to Cocoa (the new framework), and Carbon doesn't have as direct access to the GPU."
There isn't a single ubiquitous codec even when your users support the fledgling standard otherwise.
H264 is getting to be pretty darned ubiquitous, close to how MP3 was for audio back in the heyday of Napster. Sure, you still had Real Media files and Windows Media files, but mostly people used MP3. Also, technically you're supposed to pay a patent licensing fee for distributing MP3 encoders, MP3 decoders, and even MP3 files, so it really isn't that different.
So who doesn't use H264 to encode their movies? In my experience, it's mostly (a) people who use Ogg for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons; and (b) pirates who are under the mistaken impression that the old DivX encoder provides better compression than H264, or believe that H264 is a proprietary Apple format. Yes, I know there are other reasons to use other formats, but I think the two I mentioned probably take care of most of the normal consumer uses (ignoring legacy devices).