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YouTube Explains Where HTML5 Video Fails
awjr writes "YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 <video> tag has and may never have."
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Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.
This rental is currently unavailable in your country.
Surprise, you aren't offering those videos.
Not trying to be confrontational but I don't understand your comment and hoped you could explain further.
I took your comment to mean that even though there were better formats available, MP3 became standard because it was open.
My confusion is thus-
1-when MP3 first started being widely used (I started using it extensively in 1997) it was competing with WAV files. There were no better formats.
2- MP3s are only 'open' in the sense that they don't have embedded DRM. It is still a proprietary format with license fees attached.
I like the fact that I can jump to any part of the video and even direct people to that part of the video with a single url.
HTML5's <video> element supports JavaScript seeking to a new playback position. Your video page can read the fragment identifier from the URI, parse it, and then set the video element's currentTime attribute to make the player seek. The back end uses an HTTP/1.1 range retrieval, the same thing that resumable downloads use.
the video tag doesn't really do steaming in that sense.
Steaming as in a "steaming pile"?
He's generalizing, but there were no other formats that could do 12:1 compression like MP3 did when it came out. Few people remember that if you wanted to rip a CD it was a 50 megabyte file. I still remember playing back a small little file with a .MP2 extension on a Dell 486 running Windows 3.1 and going WOW - thats amazing! (gives you kind of a timeline on how long ago this really was). It was some tune from Kimagure Orange Road.
ATRAC btw was only used internally at Sony for DAT and Minidisc (and later AT3 cd's) - there was never any way then to make or play back an ATRAC file on a home PC until somewhat recent history (and only then to try to lock people into using ATRAC over MP3).
HTTP lets you seek to a byte range, but how does that map to a location within the file?
Find the known timestamps before and after the desired seek point, interpolate where you would need to seek if the part between known timestamps had a constant bit rate, and seek to that part of the file. The last article about Ogg vs. MKV presented a test result that it takes on average 3.5 iterations of this algorithm to get to the right part.
This could be worked around by putting this data in the header somewhere.
AVI has such an index. Matroska (wrapper used by WebM) has an index. Ogg does not, but unless you're on a satellite link, four HTTP seeks won't kill you.