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YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video

youtube-eng.blogspot.com

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Re: YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video

#4
post #2

Excellent. It's always been weird having a mobile device run YouTube more responsively than an GBP1500 laptop because the latter had to run the Flash plugin.

If your browser supports VP9, that will be forced whenever possible.

I'm not sure if switching to CPU-only video decode will be a net gain for most.

Re: YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video

#5
This is really interesting news and I think signals what will be a really large change in digital video in the next few years.

Moving from flash to HTML5 adaptive bitrate is not trivial task and if you are familiar with MSE/EME, it shows how powerful the browser has become in delivering rich video content, either pre-recorded or live streaming.

With this, it seems to me there is a big gap now for encoding to new adaptive codecs, like MPEG-DASH and tooling to make something like livestreaming easy to do without flash.

Re: YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video

#7
post #2

Excellent. It's always been weird having a mobile device run YouTube more responsively than an GBP1500 laptop because the latter had to run the Flash plugin.

If your browser supports VP9, that will be forced whenever possible. I'm not sure if switching to CPU-only video decode will be a net gain for most.

Well, certainly in developing countries where bandwidth is limited, you're going to be watching a small resolution, and any amount of CPU is fine so long as you can cut the bitrate.

There are a lot of people in places like that.

Also, Allwinner, Intel, Mediatek, and Rockchip all have SoCs announced with hardware VP9 decode: http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs (not sure how many of those are already shipping).

Re: YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video

#8

Steve Jobs predicted this in 2010 - https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Steve may have been a tad unrepresentative that "open video" issue.

Remember, this is the guy that controlled QuickTime and never opened it up. That was a bit of problem for open video supporters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

Re: YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video

#10

Steve Jobs predicted this in 2010 - https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Steve may have been a tad unrepresentative that "open video" issue. Remember, this is the guy that controlled QuickTime and never opened it up. That was a bit of problem for open video supporters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

“The International Organization for Standardization approved the QuickTime file format as the basis of the MPEG-4 file format. The MPEG-4 file format specification was created on the basis of the QuickTime format specification published in 2001.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_File_Format
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