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Moving Beyond Flash: the Yahoo HTML5 Video Player (streamingmedia.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the gone-like-a-Flash dept.

Slashdot reader theweatherelectric writes: Over on Streaming Media, Amit Jain from Yahoo has written a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Yahoo's HTML5 video player. He writes, "Adobe Flash, once the de-facto standard for media playback on the web, has lost favor in the industry due to increasing concerns over security and performance. At the same time, requiring a plugin for video playback in browsers is losing favor among users as well. As a result, the industry is moving toward HTML5 for video playback...

At Yahoo, our video player uses HTML5 across all modern browsers for video playback. In this post we will describe our journey to providing an industry-leading playback experience using HTML5, lay out some of the challenges we faced, and discuss opportunities we see going forward."
Yet another brick in the wall? YouTube and Twitch have already switched to HTML5, and last year Google started automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5.

8 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Taking a page from Microsoft by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Coming very late to the party, and probably with nothing but a run-of-the-mill offering. Is Yahoo still relevant?

    1. Re:Taking a page from Microsoft by jrumney · · Score: 4, Funny

      They are trying to leverage all the publicity they are getting from the password hack by showing everyone that they are still capable of keeping up with the state of web development in 2011.

  2. lolwut? by Desler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What challenges? Was typing:

    <video controls><source src=""></video>

    really that hard?

    1. Re:lolwut? by spongman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > Was typing ... really that hard?

      yeah, that's fine if you want your video to work only sometimes, on some devices. and if you don't need pre-rolls, or interstitials, or playlists, or analytics, or you don't care about handling full-screen correctly, or adaptive bitrate.

      pop quiz: which versions of firefox support h.264? which protocol suports bitrate streaming on google chrome on windows? on iPad?

    2. Re:lolwut? by Jahta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What challenges? Was typing:

      <video controls><source src=""></video>

      really that hard?

      Unfortunately that's too simple for many sites. They want to wrap "added value" around the video.

  3. -Still- looking at you, BBC... by mccalli · · Score: 3, Interesting

    BBC still requires Flash on my desktop Safari. Switch the user-agent to being an iPad and presto - nice, working HTML 5 video without a single layout change either. Have sent in 'feedback' time after time after time.

    Honestly, get with the times and dump Flash. Or at least service HTML 5 for preference and only fall back to Flash. Not this "let's serve Flash to HTML 5-capable browsers" rubbish.

  4. Facebook by darkain · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oddly enough, Facebook has reverted from HTML5 back to Flash for their desktop site. This is highly odd, considering they support video on non-flash-enabled mobile devices. This is extremely frustrating trying to see videos from friends and then be notified I cannot, due to lack of flash, although it worked a month or two ago.

    1. Re:Facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's likely because they added live video. The way the handle live broadcasts likely doesn't work well with current HTML5 tech.