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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It can get pretty confusing for people trying to place videos on their web site (at least at first).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sounds great, right? Well, not exactly. At least not yet.<\/p>\n
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<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong>. 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As a side note, a big part of this “video war” is due to Ogg Theora<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n Still a little confused by all this video format\/browser\/HTML 5 stuff?\u00a0 Well, you should be.\u00a0 What started out as a way to make web video simpler for people has turned into a bit of a mess.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to the title of this post…YouTube and Vimeo begin offering HTML 5 video.\u00a0 Both of these sites, for now, and when it comes to HTML 5 video, have chosen H.264 over Ogg Theora.<\/p>\n That means you can go to Vimeo or YouTube and watch a limited selection of videos using HTML 5.\u00a0 You’ll need Safari or Google Chrome or Chrome Frame on Internet Explorer to do this.\u00a0 Firefox users are out of luck.<\/p>\n For YouTube, click here<\/strong><\/a> to join their HTML 5 beta program and watch HTML 5 videos.<\/p>\n For Vimeo, click here<\/a><\/strong> and select a video on their site.\u00a0 In the lower right corner of the video description, you’ll see a blue link that says “Switch to HTML 5 player”.\u00a0 Just click on it.\u00a0 Or you can learn more about Vimeo’s HTML 5 video offerings be reading their blog post here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[421,422,423],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":880,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}