Video 3.0, sans-Flash
The web has grown up in terms of multimedia. It started off with video files just rawly linked in a page, download to view.
Then came the in-browser plug-ins and depending on what you did or didn’t have plugged in you may or may not have been able to see what the website had to offer. I particularly remember stupidvideos.com and having to use the Quicktime plug-in.
Enter Flash. Although it was around for a while it didn’t enter the video space until it was mature enough. Soon every site was serving up our hilarious cat videos with a Flash video player.
Now this is where we stand. Flash is serving up our video content. Being pushed from a variety of different services. Services like the Adobe Flash Streaming Server and others using FLV files stored in CDN’s. It’s probably the best media distribution that has reached the majority of web users to date…
HOWEVER…
Like all things, Flash’s video reign will come to an end. This time is near.
Video 3.0 will change the technology yet again. It will be defined by the <video> HTML 5 tag. Making the Internet able to deliver more multimedia to web inhabitants regardless of installed plug-in’s.
When this <video> tag is included on a website the browser will load up its own player. As an example, Safari would load up a Quicktime player (inline) to watch a video when this is in the page’s markup:
<video src="http://example.com/video.mp4"></video>
That’s it. No <embed> or <object> tags with their equally confusing attributes that if not placed correctly just don’t work.
So the player will change but will anything be better?
YES! And to make this easy here are some points:
- Adaptive bitrate changing by using the HTTP video streaming protocol
- No lagging, freezing, or crashing the browser (buffering is not one of these)
- Better graphics acceleration if the player and OS supports it
- Less CPU usage and for any MacBook Pro users, this means a cooler laptop!
- Smaller memory footprint
- No plug-in installs
- No plug-in’s to update
- Less security risks
- Supports video formats without the need to transcode
Here comes a part of me I lock away in the dark depts of my mind. Not using Flash Players for video playback will save on energy use. Yes its true and I think I can prove it.
I will do a test in a later post recording the Amps and Watts of my CPU and GPU whilst watching a standard movie, one on YouTube and the other in the browser using a browser player.
