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A Skeptical Comparison of HTML5 Video Playback To Flash

Posted by timothy on from the always-a-naysayer dept.

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."

3 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. GPU acceleration and Opera by sopssa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The second test seems to forget that Flash added GPU acceleration in Windows, which dramatically drops CPU usage. It's not even small amount, it's 60%->12% with YouTube 720p video and most likely even more with 1080p. They've been working a lot with NVIDIA on it, which means more bad news for HTML5. I also installed those new NVIDIA drivers and newest Flash beta and full screen video is considerably smoother.

    And where's Opera in this test? They added HTML5 support in 10.5 final too and their whole drawing engine will be hardware accelerated, with websites also. Their canvas implementation is also faster than with any other browser.

  2. How much of a perfomance hit for open standards? by symbolset · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How much of a performance hit am I prepared to accept for open standards? 100%. The performance of the open platform will double every 18 months, but the DRM'd content will be forever limited.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  3. Re:This is early days for the video tag by BeardedChimp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Many system on chips such as the omap3530 have a dsp. These are general purpose and for example the omap3530 can do 720p h264 and mpeg4 decoding.
    However adding theora or vp8/6 decoding is a matter of writing a codec for the dsp as opposed to having to create a whole new decoder chip.
    Devices that use something similar could add this functionality through patching even after either vp6/8 or theora get some support.