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

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

[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: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.

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: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: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.