YouTube goes HTML5
Written by marpada
A few weeks ago YouTube published the HTML5 player beta of the site. This move was promptly followed by Vimeo. The HTML5 specification, currently under revision and that won't be approved by the W3C soon, introduces, among many other features, the two new audio and video tags that will enable the streaming of audio and video files natively by HTML5 capable browsers, without need of external plugins like Adobe Flash Player (de-facto standard for multimedia streaming) or Microsoft's Silverlight. This is great news if you, like me, are sick and tired of the shameful implementation of the Adobe Flash plugin in non-Microsoft OS: awful performance, lack of stability and lagged native 64bit support. Also great if you want to access popular video sites from an iPhone or other portable plattform without Flash Support: just use a HTML5 compliant browser and you're done. Great, isn't it?
If you are wondering which video and audio formats will be supported by the HTML standard, the answer is that it is not specified, and that is where the problems begin. The aforementioned sites currenty encode their HD videos with the H.264 codec (already supported by Flash), so to benefit from the HTML5 player a HTML5 H264-enabled browser is needed. Currently there are no many options, just Google Chrome (not in Linux yet :( ) and Safari (YouTube HTML5 page mentioning IE with the Chrome Frame installed sounds like a bad joke to me).
What's up with Mozilla? Well, the H.264 codec is a patented technology and the yearly licensing fee is of several million dollars, which can be hardly afforded by and Open Source project. And what it is more important, should a propietary patented format play such an important role of the new web standard, when there exists a free open equivalent technology like Ogg Theora? A very interesting article by Mozilla's Vice President Mike Shaver can be found here. Looks like the honey moon between Google and the Mozilla Foundation came to an end not so abruptly (yes, the release of Google Chrome was the first nail).
It looks like 2010 will be a very interesting year in terms of video formats and web standards discussion. Let's hope that the dominant player can learn of the mistakes of its predecessor and, at the end, common good, net neutrality and open standards prevail over business interests.
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