After getting a lot of (offline) comments and questions about my foray in HTML5 video, it seems like the rest of the online world is also making tremendous leaps away from Flash and towards this slick new method of serving files.
What does this mean for most people? In a word, nothing… yet (ok, that was two words). The fact of the matter is that until we have full browser support for the H.264 video codec, which is currently only available in Webkit-based browsers like Google Chrome and Safari, this seamless and superior technology will never be experienced by the majority.
I don’t anticipate Internet Explorer ever fully supporting the video standard or the code to actually implement it (c’mon, 8 versions in and they’re just now figuring out how to render web pages correctly), but for this to be anything close to a victory over Flash, Firefox needs to get with the friggin program. While it’s true that Firefox does support the code to get it working, the videos need to be encoded using Theora as opposed to H.264—which, in short, requires two versions of the same file, doubling the necessary server space. You can see how this would be a problem for a company like YouTube, whose server farms are probably running at max capacity with a ridiculous 12,000 videos views per second.
So, while I personally think it’s great that those of us who opt for Webkit browsers will have an overall better user experience, not to mention that videos from both YouTube and Vimeo are now accessible to mobile platforms without the need for Flash, I would love to see this technology rolled out to the populace as a whole, which will require a massive amount of feature requests and a miracle.
