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Comment by akoumjian | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted that the native browser decoders for h264 still produce worse color presentation than flash players. Also, the flash runtime's pseudo-streaming is faster than Chrome's http pseudo-streaming (it takes longer for the same h264 file to start playing back).

I love HTML5 video, but there are still huge areas for improvement that show up frequently.

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YouTube in Chrome starts playing video practically instantly, before the page is even finished loading. It's faster than Flash ever was.

parent is referring to pseudo-streaming (aka downloading a video over http), not proper streaming (aka YouTube, etc)

> native browser decoders for h264 still produce worse color presentation than flash players

which browsers? Which platforms?

Last I checked Chrome's h264 had less accurate color presentation than most off the shelf flash decoders. I can't seem to recall how Firefox's webm decoding stood up when the file was comparatively accurate to the h264 the flash player was using.

Show us the evidence of that claim.

No reason to be hostile. We investigated months back when we got reports from our users, who are professional videographers, that videos were showing up much worse in some browser situations than others. They sent us screen shots, and upon investigating found that on almost every clip we were getting better results using two different flash players we had access to than the native decoder.

I don't have some big official report because, well, that's not my job and I have better things to do. You're welcome to investigate yourself if you're concerned about it.

Here is an example of a Firefox bug report about H.264 color spaces looking different in Firefox compared to another video player. So these are real problems. :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1237562

Pseudo-streaming is (and should be) less and less used, and actually loads a lot slower than the new HTTP adaptive streaming formats like HLS and DASH.

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