• YouTube now defaults to HTML5 <video>
    47 replies, posted
[url]http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/01/youtube-now-defaults-to-html5_27.html[/url] [quote]Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 <video> tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.[/quote]
actually the HTML5 player has gotten a lot better and I can't tell the difference between it and flash
[QUOTE=fruxodaily;47023526]actually the HTML5 player has gotten a lot better and I can't tell the difference between it and flash[/QUOTE] When I switched to the HTML5 player on FF, the responsiveness improved considerably. The flash player felt like it had some input lag.
When I started using Arch Linux, before I started to use Google's flash player (which you can get separately from Chrome for use with Chromium) I used the HTML 5 viewer a lot. Now that I have both I still use the HTML 5 one.
Finally, the flash player is an abomination on youtube.
The new player on YouTube uses Media Source Extensions, and also rather badly implemented in browsers (They all seem to focus just on what YouTube needs, and outside of that it sort of falls apart). The implementation in Firefox fell behind a fair bit, but just recently they've done massive improvements and 37 (Due next month) should have it enabled for YouTube. [QUOTE=fruxodaily;47023526]actually the HTML5 player has gotten a lot better and I can't tell the difference between it and flash[/QUOTE] Especially after Google replicated a bunch of Flash bugs in it.
Still ol' shitty flash here.
I heard before that only thing that held back Youtube from switching to HTML5 was - they were unable to place or control ads on videos? is that true?
[QUOTE=KinderBueno;47023777]I heard before that only thing that held back Youtube from switching to HTML5 was - they were unable to place or control ads on videos? is that true?[/QUOTE] yea a while ago, videos with adverts and stuff still used flash even if you had the HTML5 option checked
html5 still sucks on firefox, no 480p option only 320p and 720p
[QUOTE=spectator1;47023815]html5 still sucks on firefox, no 480p option only 320p and 720p[/QUOTE] and if you enable the ability to play 60fps it can break your youtube player where you can't watch more than 30secs of video.
[QUOTE=ZuXer;47023606]Finally, the flash player is an abomination on youtube.[/QUOTE] Flash is an abomination in general
i've still got problems where chrome doesn't resize the html5 video properly and it ends up looking pixelly and bad. the fix is implemented on canary but not the normal release yet. [url=http://puu.sh/f82U7/b29c7d0f3a.jpg]html5 on left/flash on right[/url]
[QUOTE=spectator1;47023815]html5 still sucks on firefox, no 480p option only 320p and 720p[/QUOTE] Yep, it won't work until 36 is released, at the moment the automatic bitrate adaption stuff is non-functional, so it can only play the 2 "static" variants.
flash is just awful [editline]28th January 2015[/editline] I shouldn't have to download third party applications for my browser, unless certain circumstances apply
Can HTML5 do drawn animations? Is there an editor akin to Flash?
SVG/canvas can do animations, and Adobe actually make a Flash like editor for them.
[QUOTE=fruxodaily;47023526]actually the HTML5 player has gotten a lot better and I can't tell the difference between it and flash[/QUOTE] Its a lot better embedded as well, threads on FP with a lot of embedded video don't slow my browser down to a crawl with HTML5 enabled.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;47025537]SVG/canvas can do animations, and Adobe actually make a Flash like editor for them.[/QUOTE] Can't actually Flash editor export to these directly now? I don't know, I just assumed it can.
I'm still using flash until I can watch 60 fps and 1080p. I'm using Opera and I think it's silly that a browser that is based on the same project as Chrome can't do this. I'm sure that Google knew that when they added 60 fps, only Chrome would be able to play it. EDIT: Opera 27 just fixed this. Time to use the html5 player!
Firefox can playback 60fps video fine, it's not on a UA white list or anything, it's just up to the browser to handle it correctly. [QUOTE=Awesomecaek;47025603]Can't actually Flash editor export to these directly now? I don't know, I just assumed it can.[/QUOTE] It wouldn't surprise me, but I'm honestly not sure since I've never used Flash. I do know a whole lot of stuff wouldn't transfer across, no matter how much like JavaScript, ActionScript is, they're not a 1:1 translation, etc.
The html5 player doesnt have the seek preview for me though which is kind of annoying.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;47023655]The new player on YouTube uses Media Source Extensions, and also rather badly implemented in browsers (They all seem to focus just on what YouTube needs, and outside of that it sort of falls apart). The implementation in Firefox fell behind a fair bit, but just recently they've done massive improvements and 37 (Due next month) should have it enabled for YouTube.[/QUOTE] The issue with Firefox's implementation of MSE is that Mozzarella refused to use the normal implementation of it since it's proprietary which goes against their purpose. So they basically had to reverse engineer it themselves so they could support it. (At least this is what I've been made to understand about it.) It'll be nice to get 60fps playback though. Although the lack of certain resolutions seems really retarded. I dunno why Youtube can't just continue supporting all the resolutions they've always supported. One of the biggest reasons I've stuck to Flash until now is that most of the videos I watch on Youtube are in 480p resolution which is completely unavailable in html5 and while 480p is tolerable, anything below that just gets stupidly compressed and looks like ass.
[QUOTE=black_tech;47025643]I'm still using flash until I can watch 60 fps and 1080p. I'm using Opera and I think it's silly that a browser that is based on the same project as Chrome can't do this. I'm sure that Google knew that when they added 60 fps, only Chrome would be able to play it.[/QUOTE] That's absolutely hilarious to me who uses the old Presto Opera (masked as FF so sites don't complain) and can see 1080p 60fps in fullscreen both on Chrome and Twitch.
[QUOTE=Alice3173;47025763]The issue with Firefox's implementation of MSE is that Mozzarella refused to use the normal implementation of it since it's proprietary which goes against their purpose. So they basically had to reverse engineer it themselves so they could support it. (At least this is what I've been made to understand about it.) It'll be nice to get 60fps playback though. Although the lack of certain resolutions seems really retarded. I dunno why Youtube can't just continue supporting all the resolutions they've always supported. One of the biggest reasons I've stuck to Flash until now is that most of the videos I watch on Youtube are in 480p resolution which is completely unavailable in html5 and while 480p is tolerable, anything below that just gets stupidly compressed and looks like ass.[/QUOTE] Are you thinking of something else? MSE is a W3C spec, nothing objectionable in it. [url]http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source/[/url] Mozilla was working on implementing DASH natively in the browser before this came about (Along with Google iirc), but the MSE work ended up replacing it was more flexible (You can implement DASH using MSE easily, and that's in fact how YouTube works) They were against the DRM module the W3C was pushing (So were a bunch of people actually, it was handled awfully), but they ended up working out a way to implement it that let them keep the browser open source while not also handing control of the system over to the DRM module. The issue with resolutions is because under the DASH playback method, video and audio tracks are stored separately (So the player can swap out the video track without having to re-download the audio track, etc.), and they're stored using a different layout than most normal videos (Called Fragmented MPEG4) that allows for easier streaming, but also breaks the video in most normal players (So if they just offered the video for playback, odds are it wouldn't work). So Google doesn't want multiple copies of each video (non-DASH 1080p, DASH 1080p, 60fps DASH 1080p, etc.), so they just encode a couple to non-DASH, and leave the rest for DASH playback.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;47025824]Are you thinking of something else? MSE is a W3C spec, nothing objectionable in it.[/QUOTE] It's been awhile since I looked into it so I might be misremembering the exact details but the drm bit definitely rings a bell. As for the bit about resolutions, doesn't Youtube already store multiple copies of the video though? I can understand not wanting to double the number of video files to support both DASH and non-DASH but considering they've added a new even lower resolution during all this, it just seems really weird. They added 144p, removed 480p, and they've added proper support for resolutions above 1080p as well. So I really just don't see any real reason for not supporting 480p in the html5 player.
I'm sure it's just down to them finding what formats are used most often and prioritizing them, similar to how they adjust the encoding bandwidth to that a certain percentage of their users can see a specific quality setting. And the non-DASH formats at this point are for a fallback situation, they want every player to use the DASH formats, and only Firefox is the browser currently not using them (At least until Feb 23), so they're more likely to remove them than add new variants. And I'm not even mentioning the VP9 variants that Google is doing, because they're currently crap quality wise, and Google prioritise encoding H.264 anyway (Which Firefox also supports on OS X as of 36, so the market support is like 99.9%, something VP9 can't match) All that said, I think the existing quality settings on YouTube are pretty dumb, local TV content here is often 1024x576 (Because we're backwards as heck and don't have proper HD/digital TV here), but YouTube either forces that down to 854x480, or up to 1280x720, both of those options are sub-par, and outside of bandwidth/interlacing settings it should offer a "Native" resolution setting that shows content 1:1 so stuff doesn't get resized.
this version of the html5 player doesnt seem to play nice with youtube central which has quickly become mandatory for me using youtube. When the firefox beta version rolls around that supports this hopefully i wont have to find a new method. Having properly working size and quality options, and being able to edit most of the site UI, plus the ability to turn off dash playback is great.
Flash pro cc 2014 can export to canvas they are testing animated svg in the pre-release of the next update
[QUOTE=spectator1;47023815]html5 still sucks on firefox, no 480p option only 320p and 720p[/QUOTE] If you enable Media Source Extensions in about:config you can get 480p and 1080p on FF with HTML5. It works okay for me but the HTML5 player is still a bit wonky. It's still better than the Flash Player though. I fucking hate Flash.
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