YouTube and Vimeo Begin Offering HTML 5 Video

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This week both YouTube and Vimeo announced beta testing for HTML 5 video. But what exactly is HTML 5 video and what does it mean to you? Here’s a breakdown on what you need to know.

First, the overwhelming majority of video you see on the Internet is Flash. And to place Flash video on a web site for people to view, you need a few things. You need the video itself in a Flash format, you need a player for the video (the thing with the play button), which is also a Flash file. You need embed code which makes the video and player work together on a web page and the viewer needs the Flash plugin installed on their browser.

It can get pretty confusing for people trying to place videos on their web site (at least at first).

HTML 5 is the latest HTML standard for the web…and it aims to make video on the web much simpler for people. Instead of all the stuff I listed above, you just need your video file. Then you can place the video in your web page using a <video> tag…just as easily as you place images on a web page.

Sounds great, right? Well, not exactly. At least not yet.

First, HTML 5 is only supported in the latest and greatest versions of web browsers (and Internet Explorer still doesn’t offer full support). That means instead of downloading a plugin to watch video, viewers would have to download the latest version of their browser.

And second, HTML 5 has sparked a bit of a video war…as to what video format should become the web standard in HTML 5. Firefox decided to support a video format called Ogg Theora. That means to take advantage of the easy-to-add-video features of HTML 5, your video must be encoded in the Ogg Theora format and any existing Flash videos must be re-encoded to the Ogg Theora format (again, this is if your viewers are using Firefox).

Other browsers are somewhat more liberal, or not…Google Chrome supports Ogg Theora and H.264, while Safari doesn’t support Ogg Theora at all.

As a side note, a big part of this “video war” is due to Ogg Theora itself…not only in terms of existing Flash videos having to be re-encoded to the Ogg Theora format…but Ogg Theora is also perceived as producing lower-quality videos than H.264…among many other things.

Still a little confused by all this video format/browser/HTML 5 stuff?  Well, you should be.  What started out as a way to make web video simpler for people has turned into a bit of a mess.

And it looks like the major video sites (where the vast majority of people go to watch video) will ultimately have the final say in how the whole HTML 5 video thing plays out.

Which brings us back to the title of this post…YouTube and Vimeo begin offering HTML 5 video.  Both of these sites, for now, and when it comes to HTML 5 video, have chosen H.264 over Ogg Theora.

That means you can go to Vimeo or YouTube and watch a limited selection of videos using HTML 5.  You’ll need Safari or Google Chrome or Chrome Frame on Internet Explorer to do this.  Firefox users are out of luck.

For YouTube, click here to join their HTML 5 beta program and watch HTML 5 videos.

For Vimeo, click here and select a video on their site.  In the lower right corner of the video description, you’ll see a blue link that says “Switch to HTML 5 player”.  Just click on it.  Or you can learn more about Vimeo’s HTML 5 video offerings be reading their blog post here.

2 comments

  • Wow. Thanks for making this simple. Not. LOL. I love a free market place. Someday soon this will all work itself out. Truthfully though, I think guys like us will do well in our Briar Patch! Viva la confusion!