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YouTube, Vimeo Ditching Flash for HTML5

Posted by hkwint on · 6 comments
Tom's Guide; By Kevin Parrish
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YouTube and Vimeo is kicking Adobe's Flash to the curb in favor of the sharp new HTML5. Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it's no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn't require Adobe's software to stream content to viewers.

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Comments (6)

Why is this even on LXer.com?

The article praises Google for implementing the video support of HTML5 in a proprietary way, and it praises two proprietary web browsers for working with YouTube's HTML5 approach. This has nothing to do this Free/Open Source Software, other than a mention of Chrome. Had Google chose Ogg and YouTube's HTML5 video worked in Firefox, it might have been acceptable.
There is no mention of what encoding the videos are using. Is it using HTML5 as a player, but still Flash/h.264 as the video codec? If so, that doesn't make a difference in term of "free".
Yes. It uses some kind of container (I'm unsure which) and a H.264 codec, as Opera (beta), Safari, and Chrome have a H.264 decoder built-in. I don't know if Googles H.264 decoder is proprietary, it would make sense if it is. FLV and H.264 are proprietary codecs, so yes it does make a difference in term of "free". As "free" means freedom. And just being able to play the video isn't enough.
Sorry, I'm not perfectly fluent with this. I didn't thought about the decoder itself can be open source implementation, so I guess in this case it is similar to Gnash decoding flash videos. Google, however, do have to encode the uploaded videos to propriety formats when they upload them. So I would still like to know about that part of process.

When I read this article's title, my initial impression was Google will take up the proposed free video format for HTML5, Theora, as their broadcasting codec, until I read the finer prints. Had a bit of a shock for a moment.
This is a non-story. The only thing that changes is that you play Flash videos in the browser rather than in Adobe's player.

Unless I'm missing something, it's not accurate to say they are "ditching Flash". I suppose it would be nice if I didn't have to install the Flash player. Of course this way I have to install Chrome and give up Firefox.
Quoting:This has nothing to do this Free/Open Source Software


You're wrong, it does.Otherwise I wouldn't have posted it. Simply put: HTML 5 is open, Flash isn't. I wrote an article about how this decision is related to open standards and Firefox, but it's in the queues. Let me see what I can do to make it available ASAP.

ed: OK, done (thanks Scott or Sander for adding the template), it's on the frontpage. http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/130948/

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