The next major release of HTML, dubbed HTML 5, will include several new tags for embedding audio, video and other graphical content in web pages.
Currently, your browser needs a plugin to play embedded multimedia content. For instance, you need to install Adobe Flash Player for watching videos on YouTube while the QuickTime player is required for viewing movie trailers that are available on the Apple website.
That may however change because the HTML 5 group has recommended some new tags – <audio> and <video> – that will let you play video files in the browser without the Shockwave Flash plugin.
You can visit youtube.com/html5 to see the HTML 5 video tag in action.
This may look like a regular YouTube video player but the interesting part is that the YouTube video clip will play just fine even if you disable (or completely remove) the Flash Player from your browser.
You can either use Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome or Safari 4 to view this video but no Internet Explorer.
And here’s a single line of HTML 5 code that was used to embed this video clip on the YouTube page:
<video width="640" height="360" src="file.mp4" autobuffer> <br>You must have an HTML5 capable browser. </video>
This YouTube page demonstrate some of the capabilities of HTML 5 but it’s nearly impossible predict at this stage if HTML 5 (or the Open Video format promoted by Mozilla) can make any impact on the ubiquitous Flash Player which, some estimates suggest, exists on more than 90% browsers.
The other problem is that none of the older browsers can understand content that’s wrapped inside the <video> tag so you’ll still need to embed your video streams through Flash or an alternate technology like SilverLight.
That said, HTML 5 still looks very interesting and exciting.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/youtube-video-without-flash-player/9016/
Reader Comments
Well, it’s not working on my Chrome (1.0.154.65).
Ah, for some reason it’s not working either on my Firefox… (3.5 preview).
Dailymotion’s demo, on the other hand, works just fine (but only on Firefox 3.5) :
link
Written by Clément on 06.10.09
What browsers are HTML5 compatible?
Written by Sanjay on 06.10.09
same here… doesn’t work with firefox 2.0.0.18
Written by chang on 06.10.09
Safari 4.0 supports HTML 5
Written by benjamin on 06.11.09
This works with the latest version of Chrome
Written by Vijeesh on 06.11.09
Um… what about Opera? Wasn’t Opera the first browser to implement the tag?
Written by Vladimir on 06.14.09
Not working with Chrome 2.0.172.31.
Makes Safari 4.0 lock up with 100% CPU usage.
Written by Strider on 06.14.09
“That said,”
Heh.. wrong! Older browsers DO IN FACT UNDERSTAND content inside video tags, its the tags themselves that they don’t understand. This is the method of using them, newer browsers that understand them, use the tags themselves.. and older brosers fallback to using whats inside the open and close video tag.
Written by g on 06.14.09
Doesn’t work with my Chrome (2.0.172.31). Vijeesh, what version are you using?
Written by AdamV on 06.14.09
Safari 3 also supports <video>, although only with .mp4 files. Firefox 3.5betas only use the .ogv (theora) format. Opera also supports <video>, but I don’t know what video formats it can handle.
To the author of this post: what you call Mozilla’s ‘Open Video’ _is_ the HTML5 <video> implementation. It is not a different beast. The only issue here is what video file format will work best for the web (theora and H.264 being the main options). (think of <img> having to choose between GIF, JPEG and PNG back in the day).
Best of all, you can specify different source files within a single <video> tag, so if Browser A can’t understand src=movie.ogg, but src=movie.mp4 is also listed and can be read then that is played.
Written by Hanspeter on 06.14.09