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 t

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.