“Vimeo’s new HTML5 system is just like YouTube’s, in both execution and technical details, in that it’ll only work with a few browsers—Safari and Chrome, for now—and that it’s compatible with most, but not all, of the company’s video libraries. It’s something that most people won’t bother to try at this point, and if they do, they’re probably be underwhelmed, since HTML5 video playback is almost indistinguishable from Flash video playback,” Herrman reports. “But it’s primed to be something that everyone ends up using, and that would be a Very Good Thing. Flash video performs terribly on Mac OS X and Linux, and on the few mobile devices that do support it, playback is uniformly terrible.”
“HTML5 allows certain types of video to be rendered in the browser natively, like JPEGs or GIFs are now,” Herrman reports. “It’s an objectively simpler, more efficient solution, and disregarding the massive infrastructure built up around Flash video, it would be the obvious choice.”
Herrman reports, “Luckily, YouTube accounts for a hefty chunk of said architecture, their catalog is rendered in HTML5-friendly h.264 format already—that’s how you watch in on the iPhone and Android, by the way—and with help from smaller sites like Vimeo, they could actually get the ball rolling on, you know, murdering Flash video.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Support HTML5 and die, Flash, die!