YouTube videos now available in HTML5: Good riddance, Flash

I've personally used Opera, Firefox, IE, and Chrome. Out of them, Firefox and Chrome, from my usage, has worked the best. The best, though is Firefox. Even though I've had it crash on me, a couple of times, it's still better than most of the rest. It can be used on just about every operating system out there, and is portable, as well. With one or two additions, Firefox can be made to better than IE.

This is a good move trying to find an alternative to Flash but HTML5 is still in testing and features such as advertising and full screen are not available. This discussion shall be re opened after the YouTube's experiment is over: Have a look here to read more about the subject: http://www.thehdstandard.com/hardwaresoftware-solutions-for-streaming/html5-to-compete-adobes-flash-player/

Catalin
Professional Streaming Consultant

You know that the video is the same resolution no matter what size you blow it up to, right? Being full screen doesn't magically downgrade the quality. It's the same number of pixels as ever.

Try to do this with HTML5 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH7iPF1Wnfg

Again, Web without flash is like going back to the cave age era.

and you hate flash because macs cant run it........i cant see your logic

If you choose 'Open in new window' (top right) then expand the video it opens in full screen.

On the 24" iMac I don't use full screen but on the 13" MBP the quality is less of an issue.

I'm not sure why the splash page at http://www.youtube.com/html5 says full screen isn't supported.

@SophT and @numpty:

Well the MP3 format has the same patent issues as H.264 but you don't see music players that don't support the MP3 format, at least not that are commercially viable.

Here's the real issue: There are basically no videos on the Intawebz in Ogg Vorbis format (the exceptions that prove the rule are possibly WIkipedia and a few lightly visited opensores sites).

There is no way in hell that either YouTube or Vimeo are going to re-rip their vast libraries to cater to the strange licensing quirks of FireFox.

Add to that, the fact that H.264 is hardware accelerated in many popular graphics cards or on-board graphics chips and Ogg Vorbis is not and likely never will be.

So what that leaves us all is HTML5 video tag support in Firefox that is restricted to an obscure, ignored codex that nobody implements; and the default for that 99.999% of the time when that that isn't available is a fallback to the universally hated Flash-based video container. (N.B. Flash also has patent issues.) And *nothing* performs worse on OS X than Flash.

So our choices are:

(1) We can continue to use the allegedly "open" Firefox and it's opensores Ogg implementation which, in the real world, means continuing to have to tolerate Flash-based video on our Macs (and, possibly one day, on our iPhones and tablets).

(2) We ditch Firefox and embrace Safari or Chrome and tolerate a much weaker plug-in interface but move farther (and more quickly) away from the scourge of Flash-based video containers.

(3) Or Firefox puts away their lily-white opensores robes and funnels some of the money Google pays the Firefox group (for the right to be the default Firefox search engine) into resolving H.264 container support in the HTML5 video tag, like the rest of the HTML5 browsers.

I've built Flash video players that has bookmarked cue points, closed caption, interactivity, playlist...etc. Basically things that I believe (I could be wrong) that are not capable of being done in HTML5. Also I've built players for clients that needed users to pay a fee to watch the content and the video being streamed was not (easily) able to be saved on the user's computer. Video to Video conferencing via webcam... basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm excited for HTML5 but I don't think it's going to replace or get rid of Flash (video). I feel that it's just another option.

Also... I can't live without Hulu being streamed in full screen on my MacBook Pro while working on my Mac Pro. I would hate to lose that.

I'll stick with my click2flash quicktime youtube. I love how easy it is to download videos with click2flash.

Fullscreen is great when you're watching HQ or HD videos though, especially on a computer hooked up to a TV. But I agree, for all the other really low quality videos out there it just reinforces how low quality they are.