Video: Using HTML5 with YouTube
Posted on 11. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Tips
As many already know, YouTube is attempting to get away from using the proprietary Adobe Flash standard for video playback. In mobile devices such as the iPhone and soon the iPad, you cannot use Flash, supposedly because Apple CEO Steve Jobs deems it “buggy” – causing applications that use it to crash. There is another valid argument for not using Flash, and it is because now that it is installed in so many devices it could be a security threat according to McAfee.
As previously reported here, there is a beta for using HTML5 while on YouTube. This allows anyone using a HTML5-compliant browser to use it. But that means using a compliant browser such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox or IE when coupled with Chrome Frame to use it. The current version does have its quirks, but eventually it will result in a a faster and overall better user expeience when looking at any type of media over the web.
You can take a look at how to use HTML5 and its early performance on the YouTube site right here:
It’s pretty clear from the clip that the video loads pretty fast. Instead of using Flash as the go-between, HTML5 allows web developers to directly embed compressed video files such as MPEG right into the code itself so that it can be called from a server. Not to mention that Flash can take up a lot of resources on your machine if you’re trying to load up a couple of videos. The only intermediary is the application that you use, further evidencing the fact that personal computing is becoming more centralized around the internet browser and the standard application that we use to view it.
