HTML5 Video, is Flash dead?
The Holy Grail, the savior, the killer, the dead-born, I’ve heard a lot of things about HTML5 Video, from both sides of the fence (Flash Developer and HTML5 cheerleaders). So I said to myself, why not add my voice to the noisy battle going on now on the Internet.
Following the release of the iPad, I took the opportunity to try HTML5 Video as ourtraffic was growing fast on this device (around 5000 visits a day the first week). The first thing that got me going, is the simplicity of the whole thing, 3 lines of code and you are good to go, how much simpler can it get?
I could’ve stop there and use the default UI, but I pushed it further out of curiosity to try the JavaScript API.
So I started with creating a layout for the control bar, just the regular HTML/css as you would do for anything on a web page, which is quite nice actually. As for the JavaScript, Pornhub.com uses jQuery for most of the JavaScript related stuff, I used that to manage the basic event handling and css manipulation. Coming from a Flash background, I find the JavaScript API very close to what you have in ActionScript 3 for the NetStream object, all basic actions to control your stream (play, pause, seek, mute, volume, …) . It’s still a little bit buggy here and there, but I’ll pass on that since we’re not on the final specs yet. So after an afternoon of work, I got myself a nice HTML5 customized video player, I could’ve achieved the same result in Flash (basic stream control, nothing fancy), so we’re pretty much even on that one.
Even if it seems nice, it’s still far from being as complete as Flash when it comes to manipulating the stream, securing it, and interacting with it. The lack of fullscreen support is a real blocker for me, if I stream high quality video and I’m not able to go fullscreen, it is sort of pointless. Also, I hope they will settle on a single Codec, when you have hundreds of thousands of videos, already encoded properly for PC and mobile devices using H.264 mostly. H.264 is already a standard in video streaming, Youtube uses it, the whole porn industry uses it, whereas Ogg, despite how nice it can be, it’s just nowhere near H.264 when it comes to adoption on the web.
As for the future of Flash, I’m not too worried about it, we are still far from any final specifications on HTML5, and a lot of cool features are coming on Flash (P2P streaming for example), and aside from Apple, everybody else on the mobile market seems to be on the train with Adobe and Flash 10.1 . I see HTML5 as a good alternative to Flash video in the future, but Flash ain’t dead that’s for sure, not a word on DRM support, secured streaming, and as long as it’s the case, big names like Hulu, Netflix or Brazzers are going to stick with it to stream their paying content. And while most of the people associate Flash to video streaming, Flash is a lot more than that, and Adobe is sure going to capitalize on that.
If you want to read more about HTML5 Video i recommend you to take a peak here : http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html
