YouTube Explains Where HTML5 Video Fails 426
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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YouTube Explains Where HTML5 Video Fails
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Without content protection, we would not ... (Score:5, Informative)
Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this [youtube.com].
This rental is currently unavailable in your country.
Surprise, you aren't offering those videos.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Well, it's true (Score:4, Informative)
Monopolies do not exist.
MS, Intel, Apple, and Google would all like you to convince the FTC of that.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:4, Informative)
Specious argument, really.
Content "creation" with Flash is really a poor substitute for the real tools that are completely available on all the mainstream OSes- to the point of some of the better answers being available for free or next to it on all of the aforementioned.
If you're doing "content creation" on something like Haiku, I might understand slightly, but you should already understand that you might be on your own on things like this if you choose to run things like Haiku and other up-and-coming OSes.
"Creating content" is a straw man.
F. YEAH SEEKING: set currentTime (Score:5, Informative)
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 [whatwg.org] 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 [w3.org], the same thing that resumable downloads use.
the video tag doesn't really do steaming in that sense.
Steaming as in a "steaming pile"?
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Grammar Goliath ONLINE (Score:2, Informative)
"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."
Perhaps the author isn't American; did you think of that?
Camera, mic, full screen (Score:3, Informative)
Also do we want HTML to have all the features of Flash?
Things like camera and microphone control?
Yes. Camera and mic would require a click to activate, just like Flashblock does today.
Or even the ability to go full screen?
Currently, HTML5 user agents support full screen operation: press F11 to activate it in Firefox.
And DRM?
For digital restrictions management, I'd recommend sticking to plug-ins in a PC web browser or custom apps in a mobile setting.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:1, Informative)
Going by their rate of sales, I don't think their customers disagree with Apple's views all that much.
I love my iPad, but on more than a few occasions I've had to put it down and pick up my laptop to view a site or video on the internet. On even more occasions I didn't even have my laptop with me, so I was SOL. This, because Apple decided no flash would provide me with the best experience.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:3, Informative)
iPod didn't get full HTML5 player support until iOS 4. I tried it out with Audio, and the player controls don't work quite right. Haven't tried video.
Re:Complaining About an Unfinished Spec? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [xiph.org] 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.
Corrected version (Score:3, Informative)
I agree it's a horrible sentence - I only understood it after having read the article, and even then I had to read it about 3 times. People love to hate "grammar Nazis", but this sentence could have been so much easier to understand with a comma, and a couple small changes:
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash, having major issues with features that the HTML5 tag does not, and may never, have."
I think that's what the person who wrote the summary was trying to say, but I can't be 100% certain.
Re:Grammar Goliath ONLINE (Score:4, Informative)
Keyframes (Score:3, Informative)
it requires the video to find the first keyframe, and then play from there.
Ever noticed a delay in changing the channel on digital cable or satellite TV, or jumpiness when rewinding or fast-forwarding a DVD? A lot of that is waiting for the next keyframe. There is a tradeoff between bitrate and seek granuarity because more seekable encodes have to use more keyframes. In fact, a few codecs have an option to have a frame incorporate motion relative to multiple keyframes. Such a "B-frame" can use ordinary keyframes (I-frames), semi-keyframes predicted from prior keyframes (P-frames), future frames (the P-frame or I-frame after a B-frame), and even a long-term reference frame (a golden frame). If a scene uses a golden frame across multiple shots, good luck jumping into the middle of that scene.
Using ranges to try to stream is a massive, massive hack.
Or in other words, a "steaming pile of hack". But MKV already has cueing data [matroska.org], and Xiph is working on an Ogg index [xiph.org] for more efficient seeking. The <video> element would reference video data URIs at multiple levels of detail, and a player would download each video's index.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:1, Informative)
Close. What you actually do is use source tags within your video tag specifying multiple different sources.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:3, Informative)
Funny. YouTube HTML5 streaming seems to work find for me. Also do you really need a citation for Flash's performance? Try the following... Got to any laptop and open a YouTube video. Keep an eye on CPU. Now pause it and note the CPU cycles. Now Switch YouTube to the HTML5 beta and do the same. Big difference. HTML5 video which is paused uses 4% CPU while Flash paused uses 32%. NOTE: all of the videos were complete streamed before starting the playback. Also Pause is better than Playback because nothing is suppose to be running.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:2, Informative)
I suspect you're thinking of MOD files and other tracker formats - which don't actually have anything at all to do with audio compression. :D *Some* people would make MOD files of *some* songs which sounded *something* like the original, but not exactly.
Tracking is still commonly done today in the demoscene, btw.
Re:Complaining About an Unfinished Spec? (Score:3, Informative)
Unlike previous versions of the HTML recommendations, HTML 5 will become a recommendation when at least two independent web browsers fully support the draft. Although there are obviously people writing the draft and making constant improvements to it, most (all?) of these people are also web browser developers. The draft is not being held up by some committee of random bigwigs in a dark smoky room.
That means if you're so impatient to see HTML 5 go from draft to recommendation, the proper course of action is to write your own HTML5-compliant browser or contribute to the development of one or more open source browsers.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:3, Informative)
You dropped a zero.
if you wanted to rip a CD it was a 50 megabyte file.
CDs are up to 700 mb, the CD standard is 640 mb, most CDs are shorter. 50 mb is about average for a CD ripped to MP3 (amount of compression and length of CD makes this vary, of course), CD ripped to wav usually is around 500 mb.
Re:Stop raining on our OSS parade with your "facts (Score:3, Informative)
HTML5 video which is paused uses 4% CPU while Flash paused uses 32%.
I just did what you said, paused a Youtube vid in Flash, and the browser CPU usage dropped to around 2-4%.