Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 video tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.
Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 video by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.
It seems like only yesterday that Flash was required for everything.
It seems like yesterday it was enough to have one of browser plugins, and most likely either WMP or QT was preinstalled by OS.
It is hard to understand why do webmasters including YouTube ones have chosen something weird not having brightness, contrast and gamma adjustment controls, not having tempo increasing feature and other features specific to professional video players.
I for one have been longing for aspect ratio control since I was a young man. Can someone please shout in the ears of all video hosters that we have a problem ?!!
Because a youtube player is recognised by everyone and doesn’t require any HTML-knowledge while also taking care of the hosting.
adjusting brightness, contrast and gamma is simply not something that most consumers bother with. They might change this for the entire screen if needed.
Youtube DOES support changing the speed (I watch most things at 2x) even in HTML5 in IE11
that instead of “supported in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.” that list would read ” supported in Chrome, Safari 8 and Firefox and maybe future versions of IE”
When did IE get more compatible than Firefox AND did Google decide to actually acknowledge that?
According to html5test.com the only thing FF35 can’t handle but IE11 can is multiple audio tracks, this may be the cause.
http://html5test.com/compare/browser/firefox-35/chrome-39/ie-11.htm…
You might want to check:
http://youtube.com/html5
To see where the problem is. I suspect MSE is not supported, which they need for their adaptive video streaming solution in the player.
2008 called and said thanks.
It seems that the HTML5 version is a little more generous about how much of the video it pre-buffers than the Flash version. Can’t wait for this to come to Firefox stable.
Can I opt for Flash-only playback?
Youtube with Flash plays fine on the old systems I have, but with HTML5 it stutters even on 480p in fullscreen.