A Skeptical Comparison of HTML5 Video Playback To Flash 391
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."
This is early days for the video tag (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Flash aint so bad (Score:2, Insightful)
html5 is a clear winner (Score:2, Insightful)
HTML 5 is a clear winner by virtue of not being Adobe Flash or any other proprietary application but an open standard.
Halp! I are teh stupidness! (Score:2, Insightful)
Could someone please tell me what the point of Flash video(or html 5 video) is? I can watch mpeg2 films on clonky old hardware (remember multimedia PCs?) that won't play Flash, so is it just that flv is a smaller filesize? If so, how much smaller? Is it that flv renderers scale better than mpeg2?
Let's wait and see (Score:5, Insightful)
Retro machines (Score:3, Insightful)
Misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Let's wait and see (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:standardize a codec for html5 or die trying (Score:2, Insightful)
This is an issue for browsers like Firefox.
"Only" because Firefox refuses to use something like DirectShow to use whatever codecs are available on the system.
See here [mozillazine.org] for why; they aren't necessarily bad reasons, but changing their opinion on this matter would largely solve the H.264 codec patent issue as far as Firefox is concerned.
Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
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:This is early days for the video tag (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people can't manage their own desktop, how they gonna manage their own risk?
Honestly (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
If NVIDIA would put the effort into making an open codec (such as Dirac) directly in the GPU firmware, and keep their Linux driver updated properly (or just open source it ... all the magic is in the GPU so the driver should just be a means to pass data between CPU and GPU), then an HTML5 based video would display well, too.
This is NOT a showing of whether Flash is better than raw video, or not. It's a showing of what secret backroom deals can do to lock out safer, more secure, more open, ways of doing things, and doing them just as fast, if not faster. If speed really is the issue (and it's NOT number one for me), then show it honestly by putting an equal effort into both. They clearly failed to do that in this case.
Re:Not a crap article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Isn't the codec the responsibility of a codec library? I played H.264 videos on Linux today. Mozilla could just use gstreamer or what ever else
Re:Not a crap article (Score:1, Insightful)
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 [adobe.com] it says:
I know Adobe makes this claim, I just don't understand it. Webkit exposes WebGL which allows for exactly that in the browser and is what HTML 5 uses. General software on OS X accesses GPU acceleration vie CoreGraphics/OpenGL. So I don't know what Adobe is talking about. There are certainly graphics accelerated games and video editing software galore on OS X.
Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just odd to compare two different tech stacks (which can do just about anything) by measuring their video playback performance.
As long as hardware acceleration works, the language (or whatever you want to call it) is not a big factor. It's like comparing an apple (which may have a gorilla supporting it), in a cage match with an orange (which may have a gorilla supporting it).
Flash uses the GPU (except on OSX - boo Apple). HTML5 will use the GPU on every platform sometime in the future. I know which one my money's on.
I don't like it that HTML5 will win due to Apple's dirty tricks, but face it - sometimes the end justifies the means.
Re:I've yet to see HTML5 video work (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see any fundamental difference between native support of jpeg and native support of video codecs.
Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
If NVIDIA would put the effort into making an open codec (such as Dirac) directly in the GPU firmware, and keep their Linux driver updated properly (or just open source it ... all the magic is in the GPU so the driver should just be a means to pass data between CPU and GPU), then an HTML5 based video would display well, too.
And... what would be in it for them? They're not going to spend all that money to get Slashdot bragging rights.
Simple math (Score:2, Insightful)
HTML5 = non-proprietary.
Flash = proprietary.
HTML5 > Flash.