Use HTML5 to view YouTube, if you have Safari

Chris White (chrisWhite) NeoSmart has launched an HTML5 player for YouTube that ditches flash, but codec licensing drama limits support to Safari.

November 9, 2009 2:55 PM ET in News, , , , , , ,

flashThere’s no shortage of complaints about Adobe’s Flash.  Despite poor Linux and OS X support, and a comedic smartphone presence, many simply tolerate it because there’s no popular alternative. There are small signs of rebellion, however, the most recent of which is NeoSmart’s YouTube HTML5 Viewer.

The browser plugin avoids Flash by pulling YouTube’s H.264 streams into an HTML5 canvas video player. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera have not yet licensed H.264 for use in their browsers, which makes Safari the only compatible browser.

While shedding YouTube’s Flash wrapper is a notable achievement, the industry’s treatment of H.264’s licensing terms limit the utility of NeoSmart’s plugin.

15 Comments:

  1. chrisWhite
    9 Nov '09, 8:22 pm

    Now if only Safari 4 was any good on Windows. Safari for OS X is actually my favorite browser (until Chrome works out more of the bugs) but it's abysmal without unsupported 3rd party plugins that rely on a hack that doesn't work on Windows. Then again, I think the more stable Chrome on Windows would beat Safari with add-ons anyway.

    Oh well, any progress made against Flash anywhere is a good thing in my book.

  2. Lincoln
    9 Nov '09, 9:14 pm

    Baby steps. This is good stuff.

  3. jared
    9 Nov '09, 9:30 pm

    http://www.youtube.com/html5

  4. shwaip
    9 Nov '09, 10:04 pm

    Installing safari 4 to check it out. Why not?

    well apparently youtube is down for maintenance.

  5. shwaip
    9 Nov '09, 10:16 pm

    ...and it just crashed after failing to load.

    I don't know if it's intended behavior, but whenever i search for anything, one of my cpu cores pegs to 100%, and then i end up back at the original O3D demo page.

  6. chrisWhite
    10 Nov '09, 1:17 am

    Hot link Jared, though the UI on the video didn't update position or buffering for me.

  7. ardichoke
    10 Nov '09, 2:07 am

    /me sighs
    It annoys me so much that they won't pick some sort of open video standard for HTML5 and say that's the standard, live with it.

  8. RWB
    10 Nov '09, 4:27 am

    Been playing with that O3D and wishing I still did web design

    On topic though that HTML5 link to the O3D video seems to work fine in Chrome for me.

  9. Cliff_Forster
    10 Nov '09, 1:44 pm

    In June Adobe and NVIDIA finally announced GPU acceleration for flash. June 2009 and they are just getting around to GPU acceleration? Apparently deeply rooted standards don't have to innovate at the same pace?

  10. AlexDeGruven
    10 Nov '09, 2:06 pm
    Quoting RWB

    Been playing with that O3D and wishing I still did web design

    On topic though that HTML5 link to the O3D video seems to work fine in Chrome for me.

    Chrome and Safari both use the same rendering engine.

  11. chrisWhite
    10 Nov '09, 8:55 pm

    However, Chrome hasn't licensed h.264 so the top link doesn't work in Chrome. I'm thinking YouTube must have switched the codec for that demo but I could be wrong. I did test the first link in Chrome on both Windows and OS X and neither of them will play the h.264 files in the .mp4 wrapper.

  12. AlexDeGruven
    10 Nov '09, 8:58 pm

    Someone needs to step in and swing out a standard. Otherwise, we're going to be in the IE5 era again with different models for different browsers. In that case, we all lose.

  13. chrisWhite
    10 Nov '09, 9:02 pm

    Agreed. The problem is that h.264 is a fantastic codec (as long as you're careful with your black levels) and none of the open standards can match it yet. We'll get there.

  14. Yo'av Moshe
    17 Jan '10, 5:26 pm

    using H264 for videos forces users to use certain browsers. I don't care how good the codec is, I want to make sure that I can see the video in any OS using any browser at any time.

    Besides, Theora is already better than H264.

  15. ardichoke
    18 Jan '10, 9:44 pm

    I dunno about better... Theora makes some mighty fine video but everything I've read suggests it's far too resource hungry. If they could get decoding to be a bit less intensive then I might agree.

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