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."

Comments

GPU acceleration and Opera

[sopssa]

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.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[shutdown -p now]

Unless a biggie like Google /MS /Apple back on HTML5 i don't see why it would replace incumbent standard

Both Google and Apple are heavy HTML5 backers. Not only they're on the W3C working group for it, but their respective browsers already implement large parts of it (including, specifically, HTML5 video).

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[shutdown -p now]

Well, I can't speak for Google, but Apple was one of three companies (two others being Mozilla and Opera) which founded WHATWG, thus putting a start to HTML5 development.

Also, it doesn't make sense for them to "comply with the standard" when there's no standard yet. As it is, both Google and Apple (and others) are writing the standard, and implementing the current drafts. Google also provides HTML5 beta of YouTube. If, as you say, there is no real business case for them to promote HTML5, they wouldn't do either thing.

The reason why Google touts Flash support in Android at the same time is because Flash is still relevant today, and because this is a major competitive advantage that Android has over iPhone. It would be foolish of them not to raise that point.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[Runaway1956]

From the submission: "On the other hand, Flash more than held its own on Windows,"

"When was the last time Performance and better quality became critical in deciding which tech will be widely deployed?"

Personally - I wish that SECURITY were the primary criteria in deciding which tech will be widely deployed. I'll sacrifice a bit of "performance", if HTML5 proves to be immune to all the exploits that Adobe products are open to. Yes, of course, HTML5 will have exploits, but Adobe seems to be wide open today.

Yes, HTML5 supports "super cookies" - that's a potential exploit IMO. What else is there?

Security, security, security. If a new technology opens an entire new class of exploits, then it's not worth having, even if it increases "efficiency" by orders of magnitude.

That said - I favor HTML5, because it is "open", and people can manage their own risk. With Adobe being closed, the open source crowd isn't free to search for the exploits that the black had people keep finding.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[PopeRatzo]

I favor HTML5, because it is "open", and people can manage their own risk.

Most people can't manage their own desktop, how they gonna manage their own risk?

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[IntlHarvester]

I wasn't particularly impressed with the Youtube HTML5 beta (using Chrome) and ended up opting out. Playback wasn't very smooth, the video controls are slightly buggy, and HD videos seemed to take more time buffering. As of right now, the Flash player provides a far better experience.

(And Youtube's player controls are probably far better than anything the average developer could come up with.)

Internet nerds are predicting that HTML5 will be the death of Flash Video, but IMO it still looks like it has a long way to go.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[nahdude812]

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).

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[Runaway1956]

Super cookies, yes. Maybe you have some? Read:

http://www.imasuper.com/66/technology/flash-cookies-the-silent-privacy-killer/

http://www.fightidentitytheft.com/blog/new-breed-super-cookie-defies-removal-almost

http://lifehacker.com/5245418/betterprivacy-prevents-tracking-by-flash-other-super+cookies

In short, if you don't know any better, Adobe enables web sites to install a cookie that your browser doesn't even know about, let alone manage. And, those cookies persist forever, tracking anything that the website chooses to track.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[cheesybagel]

No need to bother. All that needs to happen is for someone to add CUDA or OpenCL acceleration to the codec playing and it will still be offloaded to the graphics card.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[Runaway1956]

Well - maybe it's not a direct equivalent, but yes, HTML5 has the potential to keep such persistent cookies, as large as or larger than flash now uses.

http://completosec.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/html-5-persistent-offline-storage-as-a-risk-management-challenge/

Or, you can just google "html5 persistent cookies" for more, and better hits. It's the "persistent" part that I'm concerned about, and the ability to find them, sort them, and manage them. Normal cookies aren't a problem for anyone with even minimal computer competence. These new Super Cookies are a problem for even moderately computer savvy people.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[jedidiah]

> 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.

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[nine-times]

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).

Re:GPU acceleration and Opera

[Bert64]

Well if you look at web browsers on the Amiga platform, they typically had no built in support for any image formats whatsoever. The OS provided a facility called "datatypes" which allowed any application supporting datatypes, to load any format for which a valid datatype was available. Amiga browsers were among the first able to display PNG images on the web simply because a PNG datatype already existed.

How much of a perfomance hit for open standards?

[symbolset]

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.

This is early days for the video tag

[javilon]

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.

Re:This is early days for the video tag

[sopssa]

Actually, GPU acceleration is why Theora is losing to H.264 again. H.264 can be already hardware accelerated in almost every device from PC's to mobile phones. But Theora doesn't have such support.

Re:This is early days for the video tag

[marcansoft]

That's H.263, which is a horrible piece of crap. It's what youtube used before H.264 and they still do for the low-quality version of videos. There's no question that Theora beats the old flv H.263.

Re:This is early days for the video tag

[dingen]

Maybe not on a PC, but in a handheld device you really can't let the CPU do the decoding. You simply can't get the 10 hours (or so) of video playback on a phone that way with today's chips and batteries. A dedicated video decoding chip is the only option for such devices and right now, a chip for decoding MP4/H264 is already present in most systems.

Re:This is early days for the video tag

[BeardedChimp]

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.

Re:Why compare?

[shutdown -p now]

HTML5 hasn't even settled on a video codec

They aren't goint to settle on it. It will be unspecified, just as image formats were in past HTML specs.

how can there even be a real comparison here?

You compare both platforms with the same codec, of course.

Of course HTML5 can't take advantage of GPU acceleration yet, they don't even know what they'll be accelerating yet!

If they don't know, how do they play it today?

In fact, they do know. A de facto standard is already in place (Flash played a part in that as well), and it's called H.264.

HTML5 hasn't had the chance to implement GPU acceleration and that maybe they should consider it as part of their criteria in their codec selection process.

HTML5 doesn't implement acceleration, browser vendors do. It's not any harder for them to do so than it is for Adobe, so presumably, if Flash can hardware-accelerate, so can the browser. It's just that they didn't get to that point yet.

Anecdotal evidence

[Ma8thew]

Obviously this is anecdotal, but the fans on my Macbook pro often spin up playing full screen flash video, but never while playing video in Quicktime. But even if HTML5 performs no better than Flash currently, HTML5 still wins because it doesn't rely on Adobe to issue security and performance updates.

Check your sources...

[diamondsw]

gollum123 also links to additional tests indicating that Flash "does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows."

Yes, tests provided by... Mike Chambers of Adobe. I'm sure that they're completely impartial.

When I turn on HTML5 video support at YouTube, the exact same clip in the exact same browser on the exact same OS on the exact same session runs at a third of the CPU power. Sure, it's an anecdote - and one that's been observed by hundreds if not thousands of others, consistently over the years. But according to Adobe, nope, no problems at all. Emperor's clothes look really chic.

Fuck off, Adobe. You had years to improve your damn plugin, and we'll all be better off when it and its horrid performance and security record are no more.

Let's wait and see

[oljanx]

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.

Misses the point

[gweihir]

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.

Re:I've yet to see HTML5 video work

[AresTheImpaler]

check this:
http://jilion.com/sublime/video

Not a crap article

[Macka]

The author implies that adobe can't use gpu for flash on mac. Why not?

It's not a crap article because it's true. If you look at the 10.1 public beta release notes it says:

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.

How Apple react to this will be a good litmus test of how fair Steve J is prepared to be with Adobe. Will he make the APIs available to benefit his customers but risk making HTML5 less attractive, or will he just ignore them and play hard ball.

As for Linux, the historical lack of a unified approach to solving this (that includes all interested parties) is going to leave us out in the cold for some time yet. Let's hope that Gallium3D sticks, gains enough traction and doesn't get dropped for something else a few years down the road. That will make a nice change!

Re:Not a crap article

[TheRaven64]

It's not quite true on OS X. There is a standard way of playing back H.264 using hardware acceleration: use QuickTime. Adobe can't use this because they ship their own H.264 implementation (which is slower than the QuickTime one and ffmpeg), rather than using the supplied one. There aren't hooks for adding GPU acceleration to arbitrary CODECs, unless you use OpenCL, but there are APIs for playing back H.264.

Re:Halp! I are teh stupidness!

[flyingfsck]

MPEG2 compresses by a factor of about 5 to 10, while H.264 AVC compresses by a factor of about 20 to 30 and the subjective quality is better too, being not blocky.

Honestly

[trifish]

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.

Re:I've yet to see HTML5 video work

[hairyfeet]

I don't know about him but I tried your link on my netbox, a 1.8GHz Sempron running XP Home, and it kept the CPU redlined while the video was a slideshow, even though the video was just a tiny slice on the screen, while only having two tabs open (this page and the video). Meanwhile Youtube H.264 in SD plays just fine full screen and plays nicely even with multiple tabs open.

Was that the point you were trying to make? Or was it that the link you provided was to a "better" HTML5 player? Because if I'm gonna have to fire up my quad just to watch a video in HTML5 I'll stick with Flash, thanks anyway. I can always slap a cheap 4650 into the AGP slot if I want to get HD on this single core PC, thanks to hardware acceleration. Can I do that with HTML5?