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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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Is the video tag in HTML5 a kludge? Yes. Is it more an ideal than a practical implementation? Sure. Can it compete with a commercial product that has been an accepted part of the web for over 10 years now? Perhaps not. Is it poorly implemented in most modern browsers, with no agreed upon video codec common to any two of them? Yep. Would it be getting any attention at all if Steve Jobs hadn't used it as part of his cheap excuse to block free flash apps from his iControlU line of products? Not likely.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's funny that a lot of these points end with something like "HTML 5 is working on it" or "HTML 5 is just begun" or "Hopefully they all merge to one." And that's the idea of an unfinished specification. With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).
Right now, YouTube might be forced to stick with Flash in regards to some videos but in the future I think we will see YouTube move as much as it can to HTML 5 and offer Flash as a premium service to content owners who want to deliver their content through Flash's DRM. And I'm fine with that. I don't care that you can redistribute videos of a snapping turtle laying eggs in my parent's garden.
Remember, YouTube is Google and Google has supported HTML 5 at least vocally and with their Chrome browser to the best of their ability.
My work here is dung.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
I don't care about things that are "open" but dont work in practice.
"His name was James Damore."
Flash kills battery life and stability. After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices and is likely to never be a good solution. The video tag is young, not quite there yet, and will probably be a better bet in the long run.
Without any content protection whatsoever, they wouldn't be able to offer videos which say only "This rental is currently unavailable in your country", they'd have to actually provide the video to everyone.
The "we need DRM, otherwise we can't provide all the content we want to!" argument is horrible, stupid, and insulting.
DRM does not allow businesses to provide content in new markets. DRM allows businesses to provide old markets in places where they make no sense. Every company which complains they can't do X without DRM really means they don't want to do X without magic fairy dust. Meanwhile, everyone and their grandmother is busy providing X without DRM, and the only difference is the companies which want magic fairy dust aren't getting paid.
Monopolies do not exist. People will always acquire the product they want, and if you aren't willing to sell it, all that means is that people will always acquire the product they want without paying you.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
yes. the "choice is easy to make" because *you* arent creating content. only consuming it.
Without any content protection whatsoever, they wouldn't be able to offer videos which say only "This rental is currently unavailable in your country", they'd have to actually provide the video to everyone.
But that is done entirely server-side and is completely independent of flash vs HTML5 vs animated GIF vs ascii-art. You just make the server look the client IP address up in a location database, and then decide whether to send was was requested or an error message.
Also worth mentioning, is that Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and Google is a supporter of Open Source with an open source operating system. If they did look at this from an outside, objective perspective, I trust Google will do anything they can to speed up HTML5 video support.
" ... Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice? ... "
I do! 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. the video tag doesn't really do steaming in that sense.
"The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior"
ORLY? name a major media format that is used widely that IS open format! Your idea that open format is superior is an opinion with very little to back that up.
America, Home of the Brave.
" After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices"
[citation needed]
Flash allows proper streamnig, video tag does not. Proper streaming needs a server side solution. If HTML5 isn't going to be ready till 2022 for a browser standard, how long will it take for a server-side standard?
America, Home of the Brave.
If YouTube truly thinks this is best long-term for its success, I'm afraid we'll watch a slow death as competitors nibble away market-share, one obscure platform at a time that lacks a flash player but was created to use open standards out of the box.
I don't think they do... Witness the various points in the article (Which I'm sure you read, right?) where they said "And we're helping to fix xyz problem"
But, what they point out is that HTML 5 video is untenable for even their short term success. If they went to purely HTML 5, they would lose market share rapidly to people who weren't pure OSS. What does that say, from a business standpoint?
I think you miss the point. Flash is a poorly performing closed POS that makes video on the Internet beholden to a single vendor. That is a problem any way you slice it. It's unlikely that adobe will actually fix the situation unless they're absolutely backed into a corner.
Yes, the new unfinished standard doesn't have complete support in browsers yet. Whoop-dee-doo. The "no agreed upon video codec" thing is a bit of red herring. Safari, IE, and Chrome are all supporting H264 already, and unless WebM takes off, H264 is the de facto video codec standard of the decade. Whining about how much you love DivX isn't going to change that. Even Flash is supporting H264 (That's right! If you're arguing in favor of Flash, you're arguing in favor of H264 being the de facto standard). Blaming Apple for this is also silly. They made a choice based on what they believed would provide their customers with the best product. Going by their rate of sales, I don't think their customers disagree with Apple's views all that much.
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 tag has and may never have."
I guess my point is that this sentence is terrible. How did you possibly allow this, /. mod?
Firefox has - what? - 28% of the overall market, and it doesn't support H264. Hardly 'de facto' when the second most-popular browser doesn't support it, eh?
Only because it's been around long enough to be public domain. ;)
The problem is that something that's open might eventually work, whereas something that isn't probably won't unless it's on a blessed platform. Which is the point, if it's a site devoted to Windows or OSX, having content that's not particularly well available beyond those platforms is possibly acceptable. If it's general interest like Youtube is having it be restricted artificially to a couple platforms is clearly not acceptable. Admittedly there's only so much they can do or really should do, but this sort of artificial narrowing of the market is absurd.
At least with VP8 it's available to any platform at present, whether it's been ported is a moot point as the necessary bits to port it are available.
Everyone seems to forget one thing about this blog: it doesn't say that Flash is the holy grail for video streaming and that we should all flock to using Flash and put a ban on the HTML5 codec. No, the author of the blog applauds the efforts being put into HTML5 but warns that the video tag simply isn't finished yet. The moral of the story is that while HTML5's video codec is a great start, it's way too soon to put a ban on Flash because it still offers a lot of functionality that HTML5 does not. There still is valid use for Flash over HTML5.
All of these boil down to Youtube simply not liking how the browser they downloaded today, happens to play video. The thing is, nothing about today's implementation are damning of HTML5; they're just damning of today's implementations of it. A user-initiated request to the browser or player is what should initiate full-screen video (or any other "zooming" of content), not javascript. A user-initiated request to the browser or player is what should handle seeking. The browser or its lower-level networking library should be doing the buffering. And so on.
They are really praising HTML5's strengths here. Website creators shouldn't be burdened with micromanaging how the details of how a video plays, just like they don't worry about how to incrementally display an image, how to view an image full screen, or how to implement selecting and copying text. And yet, these guys are arguing that for video, they want their javascript programmers to have to work on that shit. The sane thing to do is to push it onto the browser guys (who can then push it onto the player guys, who may end up pushing some things onto the OS guys, whatever).
I won't even touch the DRM point, because I'm not in the DRM market so I can't imagine what kinds of DRM viewers are asking for.
The only points they have which has any real legitimacy, are the camera/microphone one and concerns about serving live content, rather that content sitting in some finished and indexed file. Yes, HTML5 video isn't really intended for that, so if youtube want to deal in those areas, they've got a point that using mere web tech isn't going to do they job; they need users to download applications (i.e. Flash code) instead. Fair enough; Youtube wants to get into new markets where they'll make some money. But for most of their video and pretty much everything Youtube is known for, HTML5 is the right answer.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Free browsers don't support Flash either. You need a proprietary plugin.
Not paypal...google checkout. If you choose the "add a credit card" option, it takes you to google checkout.
Youtube says that while Flash may suck, it sucks in a variety of different ways in which HTML5 can't yet suck.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Free browsers can support H.264 through system-wide codecs. Mozilla isn't going to do it and they give you an excuse when you ask them why not: they say Windows Vista/XP users don't have the codec preinstalled (and neither do they have Flash preinstalled, but that's apparently not a problem). Then they have a Stallmanistic desire for a completely free environment, and say they won't use support already present in your system, and for which you already paid (either directly or through your OS license). Other free projects, like Chromium, have no such problems.
Mozilla is positioning itself as the only loser in this. They say they won't sacrifice freedom for anything, but they already sacrificed lots of Firefox's principles now (lightness and speed come to mind). Refusing to use the support that is already in the system would be as stupid as blocking sites or plugins because they don't convey the exact same mentality as the project. Imagine if Firefox blocked ubuntu.com because Ubuntu isn't a 100% free OS and, therefore, people should stay out of it.
For your last point, anyone is free to make an implementation of a browser supporting H.264. You may call gstreamer/QT/DShow or you can license it directly and write your own codec. I see the point in putting the freedom of the code above the freedom of the developers, but when you take away the freedom from the user (to use the video support he paid for) because of the freedom of the code, that's a real issue.
No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere. Why don't people understand this? Without protection, content owners will not distribute their content in ways that they think need protection. It's not that hard to understand. They won't say "oh well, we can't do anything to protect our content - lets just upload it all to usenet and go home for the weekend". Your logic is insulting.
It's all down to the decoder. There's a dedicated processor in the iPhone which handles h.264. For the Flash player to be as efficient as any old h.264 you want to play on the iPhone, it would have to use that processor. However Adobe doesn't have the greatest history of using accelerated features (essentially dedicated processors for decoding h.264) of the hardware they target--in fact, they only recently started using accelerated decoding on Windows.
If they don't use the dedicated chip, then they're going to be using the main CPU. It's going to be far less efficient, both in energy usage and in CPU usage. And this applies to all portable devices with acceleration, not just the iPhone. Many laptops have acceleration via the graphics hardware.
Worse, of course, is what happens when you try to move to a platform that Adobe doesn't support? Want to use 64-bit linux? Too bad. Apple wants to change their decoder on the iPhone? They have to convince Adobe to adapt to the new one. That's vendor lock-in, and it's bad for the consumer.
Funny that you conveniently forgot to mention subtitles, translations, captions, and links.
Nono, don't change it. Your argument sounds better when you spin and skew. You report, we decide.
Smart. That's like saying Windows "implemented poorly" is "slow" and can thus be excused. Yes, Gnash exists. But guess what? So does ReactOS. And they are both irrelevant, until they are *actually* used. Unlike Flash, <video> is already more stable, and due to its nature, cross-platform (able to use underlying OS rendering/decoding support), and thus theoretically more performant. Flash's demise is inevitable and stems from its own design failures.
Content providers need to understand that in order to compete with bittorrent they need to provide the content in a form that is more comfortable to access. It'll even work if they provide the content for a fee, if paying the fee isn't a massive pain the ass. (for example accommodate people without credit cards via SMS payments)
Their content will end up on bittorrent regardless of how obfuscated it is with DRM, but most people won't bother with bittorrent if they can just go to an official website and watch it streamed.
I have checked out the VOD sites in my country recently, they all either wanted WMP, a custom DRM "codec" installed or a windows-only Java applet. So I ended up going back to tpb, if they're not making an effort, I don't feel obliged.
So instead people watermark the images. I wonder why this is not done for videos.
But, what they point out is that HTML 5 video is untenable for even their short term success. If they went to purely HTML 5, they would lose market share rapidly to people who weren't pure OSS. What does that say, from a business standpoint?
It points out something remarkable and often overlooked: The market leader is pushing for open standards like it's business depends on it. That's the exact opposite of the (short) history of high tech: it's normally the marginal players that agree on standards to commoditize the market and gain share, while the leader "innovates" to keep everything incompatible. Google is pushing HTML5 to adopt more features so it can compete in a market of open standards, rather then making a gVideo player with lots of new (closed) features.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Or you can use RTMP with Flash Media Server, and have no delay at all. It supports seeking directly to non-keyframes. Which is kind of my point - Flash offers actual real streaming, complete with dynamic instant stream switching, not reliant on keyframes. HTML5's video tag offers none of that, instead relying on the crappy pseudostreaming method.
What do you mean "man hours"? Transcoding can be scripted and automated with ffmpeg. You could probably produce the requisite HTML5 with Perl. No humans are involved in day-to-day operations of such a system, so where are the "man hours" you complain about?
$ make available
What do you mean "man hours"? Transcoding can be scripted and automated with ffmpeg. You could probably produce the requisite HTML5 with Perl. No humans are involved in day-to-day operations of such a system, so where are the "man hours" you complain about?
Perl writes itself, does it? Never changes, works as is forever, etc?
The fact that Apple is trying to impose a proprietary codec it owns partially (h.264) as the de facto standard video codec for the next 10 years is NOT consubstantial to HTML5.
HTML 5 is an open source open standard, and the fact that some companies(and by some I of course mean Apple) are trying to impose their solution as an inherent part of the open solution that is HTML 5 is just BULLSHIT.
HTML 5 is NOT h.264. and HTML 5 is NOT responsible for the codec war that mozilla Google and Apple are waging.
A war that has by the way turned to Apple versus the rest a the world since Google provided an Open-source codec (VP8) that Mozilla has supported.
Don't try to put this on HTML 5 it's Jobs and Jobs alone that is at the origin of this non sense.
YouTube has DRMed content that HTML5 cannot at this time support. RTFA