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YouTube: HTML5 Video is No Match for Flash

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YouTube has some bad news for those of you hoping the site would soon ditch Flash in favor of HTML5 video tags: It isnt going to happen any time soon.

Thats message from the YouTube developer blog which cites half-a-dozen areas where Flash trumps HTML5 and explains why the

The YouTube developer blog lists several things Flash can do that HTML5 video tags cannot:

Flash cuts down on the number of formats YouTube needs to encode. With browsers divided over which video codecs to use, YouTube would need to re-encode most of its content. With YouTube users uploading 24 hours of video to the site every minute, thats no small task. The new WebM video codec offers some hope here, but it isnt universally supported yet.

Flash offers fine control over buffering and dynamic quality control.
The HTML5 video tag doesnt cover live streaming, nor does it allow for adaptive video quality when streaming long movies. However, as the post points out, a number of vendors and organizations are working to improve the experience of delivering video over HTTP, meaning theres hope this problem will eventually be solved.

Flash offers content protection.
While not the top of the list when it comes to features a user is looking for, without a means of protecting content from being distributed illegally, most of YouTubes content partners would likely jump ship.

Encapsulation and embedding.
Flash makes it easy to send extra data along with your embedded video, meaning ads, captions, annotations and extras like related-video lists automatically show up. Theres no easy way to do the same with HTML5 embed code. JavaScript, sure, but not the native code.

Fullscreen video.
This one makes the least sense. Firefox and WebKit both offer rudimentary support for fullscreen HTML5 video, though there is no hardware acceleration or other extras youd get with Flash.

Camera and microphone access.
The ability to record video directly to YouTube requires the site to be able to access your computers camera and microphone, something HTML5 video on its own cannot do.

YouTube also doesnt mention a couple of other areas where HTML5 video lags well behind Flash: accessibility and translation tools.

Clearly YouTube isnt going to abandon Flash just because the web seems to think thats the cool thing to do at the moment. For those uploading their own videos straight to a blog or similar site, the HTML5 video tag makes sense, but for sites like YouTube and Hulu, the HTML5 video tag still clearly cant match what Flash has to offer.

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