Comment by alanh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alanh | Hacker News Reader

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Flash is disabled (not JS).

Boy am I starting to get tired of companies talking about how much they love HTML5 without walking the walk. Google employes Ian Hickson, the “dictator” at HTML5’s helm,† but fails to support <video> with a Flash fallback. It’s really not hard!

Adobe is guilty of this hypocrisy; Google is quite guilty… only Apple is mostly walking the walk (you never need Flash for any of their web properties), and increasingly Microsoft (no Flash or Silverlight is needed for http://zoom.it).

Edit: YouTube supporting HTML5 ≠ this Google web page supporting HTML5.

And FWIW, even the YouTube HTML5 beta is insufficient — Many times nothing at all will play, even though third-party sites like DetURL or File2HD can find .MP4 files for that video, and the video plays fine on iOS(!). And I’m using Chrome with the plugin completely disabled, for Chrissake — Given there is no technical reason they can’t tell I don’t have Flash, it becomes obvious no one at Google cares about walking the walk.

†Dear downvoters: I am not making up, Hixie refers to himself this way. http://adactio.com/journal/1600/

Ubuntu user here, I can't watch any video on apple sites, it says it require quicktime and offers to download safari. Yes, Apple is so walking the walk on that issue...

edit: also google "why html5 video is not ready"

Interesting. That is hypocritical, you’re right.† Being a Mac user I never have this problem in any browser, except, come to think of it, for the live keynote streams they started doing a few months ago.

Apple even uses JS for use cases where one would traditionally use Flash, such as 3D product views, whereas Google still only uses Flash for Street View.

†Do you have an MPEG-4 decoder? I know a lot of Linux distros, and Firefox, only support e.g. Theora out of the box, for patent reasons.

Edit in response to edit: I know all about the various formats, etc. But <video> absolutely is ready, if you’re willing to support exactly 2 formats (MP4 and Ogg Theora) with a Flash-based fallback — something companies offer as an upload-and-paste-simple service.

> I know all about the various formats, etc. But <video> absolutely is ready

No it's not. Format is just the tip of the iceberg. It still has many issues such as fullscreen not working/implemented differently, many devices have buggy implementations, it still lacks streaming features that flash does and more. The spec is still lacking.

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs...

or if you're lazy: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Igz5gdB4uY * http://mashable.com/2010/10/07/w3c-stalls-html5/

To be fair, <video> is hardly ready for mainstream use yet.

There's a real need for it, though, as I demonstrated. I don't care who you are, you're going to have to explain why you say <video> isn't ready to be used yet! Isn’t <video> + fallback better than <video> or Flash by themselves?

<video> isn't ready yet because the implementations are very young, and they still have pretty basic bugs. We don't yet have a good comprehensive test suite for the API, and the API in fact is still in active flux (I'm literally changing parts of the API as we speak -- I have an incomplete edit that changes how the timed track API works that I'm still working on). And of course there's the issue of the codec, which is still unresolved.

Deploying a site with <video> and Flash is twice as much testing, implementation, and encoding cost as just <video> or just Flash.

Using <video> today (late 2010) is fine for experimental purposes, demos, or for people who are on the bleeding edge. But for mainstream sites who need to reach even people who use IE6, or who don't have much in the way of resources to spend on this kind of stuff, or who simply aren't interested in being the pioneers of new Web technology, then I wouldn't recommend using it yet.

This kind of stuff moves really quite fast, though. Six, twelve months from now? Who knows. Maybe it'll be deployed widely enough and with good enough quality of implementations that using a proprietary plug-in for video will seem positively anachronistic.

Thank you, and good luck with those edits.

Youtube does support HTML5, but it's optional. From your account settings enable it and on any supported videos it'll be used.

For me I'm glad it's optional, the versatility of the Flash video player is preferable for me, HTML5 might be fancy schmancy but it sucks right now for features.

Google uses iPhones to demo their latest mobile apps when they launch new features (most notably, voice search), and they talk about HTML5, but never use YouTube's HTML5 embeds with a fallback in ANY of their announcements.

Hard to sell people if you're not taking your own stance to heart.

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