4 ms·

I'm really impressed with how powerful HTML has become with respect to video content. Of particular note is the Flow Player [0], which I love to see websites us

by seccess 12y ago

I'm really impressed with how powerful HTML has become with respect to video content. Of particular note is the Flow Player [0], which I love to see websites use, primarily because it works without JS enabled! In addition, it is fast and runs smoothly. I'm simultaneously really (un)impressed how often websites over-engineer their video content. Of particular interest is Youtube, which is neigh-unusable over a slow connection because the player refuses to buffer ahead and constantly tries to be smarter than it is by switching video quality :( [0] https://flowplayer.org/player/ https://flowplayer.org/player/

bkurtz13 12y ago
Can you really make that strong of an argument that YouTube's player is "overengineered"? I'm not always a fan of how they handle things but you have to at least consider the massive scale they are working at.
- ishansharma 12y ago
  Since he was talking about slow connections, and I have seen YouTube issues on slow connections, here are two main issues: 1. The bandwidth switching is really messed up. When I'm playing something and it has buffered, let's say another 10 seconds and then quality of connection goes down, player will not switch quality after playing those 10 buffered settings. Instead, it discards all buffered data and fetches lower quality video again. 2. On iOS, video just gets stuck on low resolution. Picture will freeze, audio may stop or keep going and position indicator loops between 4-5 second interval. It will move forward 5 seconds, move back to the point it froze, repeat.
  - smileysteve 12y ago
    > 1. The bandwidth switching is really messed up. Think about the opposite use case, you're watching in low quality and decide to switch it to higher, the buffered video is all not what the user wants.
Chris_Newton 12y ago
Unfortunately, there are still some significant problems with the HTML5 video support in several major browsers. Among other things: 1. Chrome’s buffer size seems to be very small, enough to cause problems if you’re trying to watch very high resolution footage or play multiple videos together. 2. If you serve over HTTPS, Firefox sometimes seems to warn about mixed content even if everything is properly encrypted. 3. Some popular mobile devices/browsers don’t send cookies when requesting video files, which is a serious problem if you rely on those cookies for, say, authentication of logged-in users. 4. The canPlayType API is still one of the most bizarre and awkward I have ever encountered. 5. There is no standard for how video controls appear, or indeed if they appear at all before the video is actually playing. Moreover, some browsers will completely change their presentation of the controls as part of a software update from time to time. This makes it all but impossible to make clear to the user that something even is a video that they can click to play, if the video appears as part of a larger general content page rather than the obvious main element in a dedicated player page like YouTube. It also causes problems if you have short videos and include captions/annotations in the lower part of the video, as the controls may just stay there and obscure the content, which can be very frustrating for users. I think HTML5 video will be a great development in time, but right now, it is still quite an immature technology. You can use it fine in trivial cases, which is sufficient in practice for a lot of useful pages, but all kinds of not-that-tricky-really things are still broken. The more worrying thing is that some of these issues have been broken literally for years, and the browser makers show no great enthusiasm for fixing them, which hampers developing anything using the HTML5 technology that is more interesting than another basic video hosting site.
- darshan 12y ago
  I'm not terribly familiar with the technical details, but my experience as an end user is quite different from what you predict based on your knowledge of the technical details. I watch a great deal of HD video content on both Netflix and YouTube in Chrome on Linux with only HTML5. I have no idea how big Chrome's buffers are, but I can say that both of these sites work better for me with HTML5 video than they did with Flash/Silverlight plugins. And without HTML5, I wasn't able to watch Netflix natively on Linux at all. So while HTML5 video may certainly have room to mature, it is already significantly improving my experience of video on the web.

by seccess 12y ago

bkurtz13 12y ago

Can you really make that strong of an argument that YouTube's player is "overengineered"? I'm not always a fan of how they handle things but you have to at least consider the massive scale they are working at.

ishansharma 12y ago
Since he was talking about slow connections, and I have seen YouTube issues on slow connections, here are two main issues: 1. The bandwidth switching is really messed up. When I'm playing something and it has buffered, let's say another 10 seconds and then quality of connection goes down, player will not switch quality after playing those 10 buffered settings. Instead, it discards all buffered data and fetches lower quality video again. 2. On iOS, video just gets stuck on low resolution. Picture will freeze, audio may stop or keep going and position indicator loops between 4-5 second interval. It will move forward 5 seconds, move back to the point it froze, repeat.
- smileysteve 12y ago
  > 1. The bandwidth switching is really messed up. Think about the opposite use case, you're watching in low quality and decide to switch it to higher, the buffered video is all not what the user wants.

Chris_Newton 12y ago

Unfortunately, there are still some significant problems with the HTML5 video support in several major browsers. Among other things: 1. Chrome’s buffer size seems to be very small, enough to cause problems if you’re trying to watch very high resolution footage or play multiple videos together. 2. If you serve over HTTPS, Firefox sometimes seems to warn about mixed content even if everything is properly encrypted. 3. Some popular mobile devices/browsers don’t send cookies when requesting video files, which is a serious problem if you rely on those cookies for, say, authentication of logged-in users. 4. The canPlayType API is still one of the most bizarre and awkward I have ever encountered. 5. There is no standard for how video controls appear, or indeed if they appear at all before the video is actually playing. Moreover, some browsers will completely change their presentation of the controls as part of a software update from time to time. This makes it all but impossible to make clear to the user that something even is a video that they can click to play, if the video appears as part of a larger general content page rather than the obvious main element in a dedicated player page like YouTube. It also causes problems if you have short videos and include captions/annotations in the lower part of the video, as the controls may just stay there and obscure the content, which can be very frustrating for users. I think HTML5 video will be a great development in time, but right now, it is still quite an immature technology. You can use it fine in trivial cases, which is sufficient in practice for a lot of useful pages, but all kinds of not-that-tricky-really things are still broken. The more worrying thing is that some of these issues have been broken literally for years, and the browser makers show no great enthusiasm for fixing them, which hampers developing anything using the HTML5 technology that is more interesting than another basic video hosting site.

darshan 12y ago
I'm not terribly familiar with the technical details, but my experience as an end user is quite different from what you predict based on your knowledge of the technical details. I watch a great deal of HD video content on both Netflix and YouTube in Chrome on Linux with only HTML5. I have no idea how big Chrome's buffers are, but I can say that both of these sites work better for me with HTML5 video than they did with Flash/Silverlight plugins. And without HTML5, I wasn't able to watch Netflix natively on Linux at all. So while HTML5 video may certainly have room to mature, it is already significantly improving my experience of video on the web.