HTML5 Video – Should I Use It?
One of the most exciting buzz these days in web circles is about HTML5 and specifically video on HTML5. HTML5 video tag has solved the age old problem site owners and designers face on how to best embed video on websites.
Prior to the new HTML5 video tag you basically had two options for embedding video on your site to get a video player or to use a 3rd party service like YouTube to host your video and them use their embed code to put the video on your site.
Most people are currently using the 2nd option of using services like YouTube to host their videos and them embedding them on their own site. This option is not really a better design standard than getting a video player and hosting your own videos but it is quicker and free which is why most people end up using this configuration for videos.
For people who do decide to have their own video player they quickly find out that a quality one can be costly and customization may require both a graphic designer and a web designer all just to place a video on their site.
That is where the magic of HTML5 video comes in. It has a simple straight forward tag that is similar to an image tag with a source and attributes. It looks like this.
If you have ever added video to a website you know how much simpler that is. However, the problem is that the browsers of the world are not quite ready for what HTML5 has to offer.
Currently only one browser has a robust support for HTML5 video tags and that is chrome, firefox also has limited support and IE hasn’t even touched video in HTML5 in its current browsers yet. So what does that mean for you? It means a good percentage of people using computers to access the internet will not be able to render the video on your page.
Which is why for now when it comes to building websites video in HTML5 is like that golden egg sitting just out of your reach that you really want but you just cannot have. The push for HTML5 compliance is getting louder and louder everyday though so before you know it HTML5 will have enough standards in browsers to make 2.0 web design much easier.
4 Responses
6.1.2011
“Currently only one browser has a robust support for HTML5 video tags and that is chrome, firefox also has limited support and IE hasn’t even touched video in HTML5 in its current browsers yet.”
This statement is actually wrong, sort of: All current Webkit-based browsers support the video element fully – this includes Safari, Chrome and others – and has done so for quite some time. The issue instead is with file formats. Webkit only supports h.264 formats (mpeg, mov, mp4, avi), as far as I know there’s no support for WebM or Ogg video. Firefox on the other hand doesn’t support h.264 formats but does support “open” formats, e.g. WebM and Ogg video. Chrome, and possibly IE9, supports both.
To keep it simple: file format support is not the same as element support. Chrome (and possibly IE9) will give you the widest audience, but Safari and Firefox (and other fine browsers) support the **element** faultlessly.
The format dilemma is a completely separate problem
7.28.2011
What formats will this support? I just tried it with an flv, and no dice. Is this just for heavy files like avi & mov?
8.26.2011
nice article!
You can also try mediaelements.js, a jquery plugin which uses html 5 audio and video for playing video and automatically switches to a flash player when it detects that the browser does not support html5 (browsers like Internet explorer * and below)
6.15.2012
HTML5 is awesome, but the video thing it’s really annoying. Even youtube, with Chrome, the usability of video is awful. It’s terrible idea rely only on html5 to render videos.