YouTube Allows Viewing Videos with HTML5

Are you excited for HTML5? Alright, I admit that’s a little bit of a foolish question to ask, given that most people who would be excited for a new HTML spec would either be developers or serious Web enthusiasts. But, for the rest of us, refreshed HTML specs mean good things. The biggest thing is new features, that both developers and regular users alike will enjoy taking advantage of.

In HTML5, one of the most noticeable additions will be the <video></video> tag, which as you can imagine, will embed a video into a page. It’s of course not going to be quite that easy, as you’ll also have to specify the source, width and height, its codec, whether it autobuffers, and so forth. But, believe it or not, this is a fair bit easier than embedding a Flash file. Speaking of, what about Flash?

The reason people are getting excited with <video> is because it’s set out to potentially replace Flash for this usage. Go to YouTube, or pretty much any other video site on the planet, and its Adobe’s Flash that’s powering it. But because so many people are tired of Flash’s performance, or how it can bog down a browser (I had this happen to me in the worst way last night), HTML5’s <video> is looking bright.

What better place than YouTube to let people test out such functionality? Although the HTML5 spec isn’t completed, it’s still supported up to the latest revision by many browsers. However, for YouTube’s HTML5 videos, you’ll need to be using Google Chrome, Apple Safari 4 or Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed. No Firefox, Opera, or others, at this time.

To test out HTML5 video, you can go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and click “Join the HTML5 Beta”. Then, if you visit a video that doesn’t have any sort of advertisement, citations, or anything else, you can hopefully watch the video without issue. One video that this works with is with one I uploaded the other day for our NVIDIA Fermi deep-dive.

In my quick tests, the video quality I saw was nowhere near as refined as it was with Adobe’s Flash, but I’m hoping that’s more of a codec issue, or something to do with how the video is rendered. At Mark Pilgrim’s site for HTML5 (thanks to our elite coder Ben for pointing this page out), there’s a video at the bottom of the page that’s embedded with HTML5, and it looks a lot better than what I saw on YouTube. Either way, HTML5’s <video> is no doubt going to become more commonplace in the future, and I can’t wait.