HTML5 - The end of the Flash movie player?

[bmn]

Okeys, my last topic is heading straight for page 2 of VGD, so let's aim for the sky with an even more obscure topic!

We all know that playing movies via the Flash SWF format took the WWW by storm back in 2005 with the launch of Youtube and its hordes of copycats such as Vimeo, DailyMotion et al. Until then, video sites had been few and far between, and couldn't decide amongst themselves just how to handle the playing of video on a webpage. The typical setup required you to have an embeddable player installed (such as Windows Media Player) as well as a web browser capable - and configured - to use it. From a compatibilty standpoint, it was horrible, and a situation that really seems unthinkable by today's standards.

With time has come compatibility with the industry standard MP4 container and H.264 and AAC codec standards, and Adobe have recently released a beta version of Flash Player that - finally - gives its movie playing components hardware acceleration. For a format that originally offered little more than mass-availability to the end-user, Flash has become the de-facto standard through its increased versatility.

But recently a contender has emerged, from none other than the W3C (the authority that defines standards used on the web such as HTML and CSS). With the latest version of their HTML standards - HTML5 - there's the specification of a <video> tag that is specifically designed for playing video. The interesting thing about this tag is that, with the improvements in browser technology, the browser is expected to do everything involved in displaying the video on its own, with compatibility for most of the past and present standard codecs like DivX, WMV, H.264 and the like. And with all the major browsers having committed to following the W3C standards a few years ago, they will all be supporting HTML5, including this <video> tag. I know that Firefox, starting with its 3.5 release, already does this - if you're using FF3.5, here's an example - and the rest, if they aren't already, will be following suit before long.

The specification for HTML5 won't be finalised for a couple years, but historically the changes made over the course of finalising a specification are fairly minor - meanwhile the browser developers make the draft standards happen before they even become official.

This also applies to audio files - HTML5 has a companion <audio> tag that will have the browser play them. In a few years, all but the "won't update" die-hards that still use IE6 today will have a browser that will play video and audio files without any external software, and assumedly with better performance.

So, the question is, what does this mean for the Flash player? The player that can easily hog resources, the player that still doesn't have a 64-bit version (try going to Youtube if you have a 64-bit build of Internet Explorer), the player that relies on software that doesn't come installed on most systems?

I've got my own view, but rather than airing it right now I'm putting this to you. What do you think HTML5 will mean in the next five years for the now-established practice of playing video in Flash movies?

Speak.

[Sarge]

I am ready to be out of the Flash era. Seriously, I forgot how big of a headach Flash players are when I updated to Windows 7 and had to flock around to downloading plugins.

Bring it on, HTML5. I am ready.

[JezMM]

The example video let me right click and save it, like any image or music file displayed directly through the browser. Sure it was a weird filetype, but that's all I need to know really. This sounds super cool to me.

[-Mark-]

So does this mean streaming video will play faster and smoother due to not having the Flash player itself hog so much memory?

It does annoy me a bit that I could be watching 720p streaming (my laptop can certainly handle 720p downloads), but have to settle for 480p because of the extra resources used in streaming cause lag in the video.

[Kevin]

HTML 5 could very well give the Flash move player a run for its money given it's compatibility with past and present codecs. Of course right now, it's still fairly new, so only time will tell if it overtakes Flash. Yes, Flash does have it's good uses (animation being an example), but the problem is that it's both a resource hog, and to this day there is no 64 bit version, and I wish Adobe would address this.

[bmn]

@Mahzes: Yes, assumedly. I've seen anecdotal reports of CPU usage going from 90% on Flash to 15% using <video>.

Unfortunately, having read up some more on the issues affecting the subject, there's already serious problems with getting <video> in particular out there for real. While at least one major video site has committed to using <video>, and others (including Youtube) have been posting concepts, as of July Microsoft had no intention of following the <video> standard in Internet Explorer. This really surprises me, as a few years ago MS did commit to following web standards, at least for CSS, after the backlash from its horrible support in IE6. On top of that, the proprietary nature of the standards used in MP4 video means that the FOSS browsers (Firefox and Opera) won't support MP4 out-of-the-box, lest they want to pay extortionate licencing fees (as with MP3 in the past). Instead, they're championing the open-source Ogg Theora video format (extension OGV), which sucked a few years ago but has made big improvements since then.

OGV would have been the video you saw on Firefox's site, Jez.

The current situation, as far as I know, is that IE will have no support for <video>, Safari supports MP4 only, Google Chrome currently supports MP4 but has also said they will support OGV, and Firefox and Safari only support OGV. In order to play MP4 on the latter, you need to install a decoder (such as the Shark007 or Klite packs) for the codecs, which really defeats the point of open video.

The original draft HTML5 specifications stated that browsers must support both MP4 and OGV (and not necessarily DivX et al as I stated earlier, sorry >_>). However, in the light of these licencing issues - and Microsoft's stereotypical reticence - this was removed in later drafts and it now looks as though this won't actually be resolved to the extent that was originally hoped.

[Kevin]

he current situation, as far as I know, is that IE will have no support for <video>

Microsoft is working on IE 9, and there's talk about it supporting HTML 5, but no word on the <video> part of it. The build they showed off was only 3 weeks old, and it was just a tech demo of its rendering engine, so things could change between now and then.

[bmn]

Been reading some more on this, and it looks like MS changed its mind about video support in IE around September.

The MP4/OGV "battle" is still likely to be a big issue, but in some ways it's countered by the tag's support for multiple video sources (so it'll fall back to another format if one doesn't work). A Youtube rep's been quoted as saying that they're not interested in using Theora considering it doesn't stack up to the quality of H.264 and it'd be a huge waste of bandwidth if they did end up using it.

Youtube's test page I mentioned earlier is http://www.youtube.com/html5 - it only contains a half-functional player, but it does demonstrate the use of Javascript to have other objects in the DOM act as controls. If you have an MP4-compatible browser (Chrome, Safari and Opera, IIRC), try it out.

I did a short test using the Yt test page and its equivalent on the actual site. I made sure to use the same video format. Anyway, the first chart shows the idle CPU usage of 10-20% (no apps open except Paint.NET). In the second I open Chrome and load the page, then there is a sharp jump to 40-50% while playing the Flash version. In the third I play the HTML5 test version; the usage was 25-35% during this time.

Bear in mind this is using a triple-core system - Flash can use a maximum of 33% (and a bit >_>). Judging by the CPU usage figures, it's using all of that, and I had noticeable choppiness in the frame rate, even using the latest beta of Flash Player that has added hardware acceleration. The HTML5 play was smoother and used less cycles to do it. But then again it was on a simpler page, and didn't have anywhere near full functionality.

I later did a more simple test using a basic Flash movie player I whipped up, a webpage containing the basic code for an HTML5 player, and a deliberately heavy-duty video (a Street Fighter 4 gameplay video at 1280x720 and 60fps, to be precise). In this test, the Flash player, surprisingly, was noticeably smoother than the HTML5 player, and both of them maxed out the CPU - I apparently found a way to use all three cores in the Flash player without even knowing it >_> Regardless, I don't know whether this second test says something good about Flash, or bad about Chrome's video player at high framerates/resolutions. Neither compared well to dedicated players such as MPC.