Showing posts with label webm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label webm. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Unofficial YouTube HTML5 update

I have been browsing the web without the Flash plugin installed for some time now and I don't miss it one bit. It never really worked for me anyway; it was crashing on every possible video.
The official YouTube HTML5 status page is a bit outaded, so here are the improvements I noticed:
  • Many videos have been transcoded to WebM. Actually, I haven't encountered any video that would not play in Firefox in the last one or two months.
  • Fullscreen API is now present in Firefox 10 while Chromium had if for some time, so pressing the fullscreen button works as you would expect. As of version 11.61 Opera has yet to support this so you need to press F11 to go fullscreen.
  • Videos with ads don't work yet but now it will fall back to HTML5 anyway, instead of forcing you to install flash.
What doesn't work:
  • They removed the "Download Video" rick-roll.
  • Some embedded YouTube videos. They ask for Flash and don't fall back to HTML5. They probably work if you can find them on YouTube directly, because:
  • Some videos displayed in user's channel ask for Flash, but they play if you go to the video's page.

So far looking good. It would be great if other major sites would start supporting WebM (I'm looking at you Vimeo... and wimp.com), but maybe they'll follow. Better yet, it would be great if Microsoft/Apple would stop pushing their royalty and patent encumbered codec for public use, but you can't expect them to give up an income source for public interest, now can you?