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Player only supports a few browsers now, Firefox not included

The top video destination online is YouTube by a large margin – other video watching sites like Hulu are much further behind YouTube in the number of users. YouTube is constantly working to improve its service to keep its edge and help bring in more advertisers.

YouTube already showcased HTML5-based video player demo, but the video site reports that users have been asking it to do more with HTML5. To give the viewers what they want, YouTube has announced a new experimental HTML5 supported video player.

YouTube engineers wrote on the official YouTube blog, "HTML5 is a new web standard that is gaining popularity rapidly and adds many new features to your web experience. Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback. This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin."

There are a few caveats to the experimental player right now. The biggest is that there are a relative few browsers that support HTML5 at this time. YouTube lists Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer running ChromeFrame as being compatible. The capabilities will be expanded later to include new capabilities. The new video player can be used by visiting TestTube if your browser is compatible. Other issues include the lack of support for videos with ads, captions, or annotations.


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RE: Death to flash!
By heffeque on 1/22/2010 7:55:35 AM , Rating: 0
No, you are wrong. Why don't you do some research on Google.
Omnicronx's explanation only clarifies what I already said, it does not differ on anything of what I said.

The only way to include h.264 playback support on browsers without paying licensing fees is by using x264, but there are legal problems in the middle, so for now, Mozilla doesn't want to pay, nor does Google with Chromium, nor does Microsoft with Internet Explorer and nor does Opera.
If you want h.264 playback you need the ones that actually pay the licensing fee: Safari, Google Chrome and the Chrome thing on Internet Explorer.


RE: Death to flash!
By Alexvrb on 1/22/2010 9:36:34 PM , Rating: 3
Why can't they just package a free H.264 decoder with the browser installation? End users could opt out and use their own if they want. Heck Win7 can decode H.264 out of the box. I read through a bunch of MPEG LA licensing info, and I didn't see anything about fees on the playback side. But whatever, I guess you're right and they're all too worried about getting dragged into court. My bad.

This is how open standards crumble, and why things like Flash become ubiquitous. OpenGL fell behind, and HTML5's video support was pissed on by Google, since they own Youtube and want to save every ounce of bandwidth they can.


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