YouTube ditches Flash and defaults to HTML5 <video>
@thebigk
•
Oct 27, 2024
Oct 27, 2024
1.5K
YouTube videos will now be streamed using the latest HTML5 technology instead of the age old 'Flash'. YouTube official Richard Leider wrote on the official blog post that given the advancement in HTML5 YouTube engineering team was able to make, the web version of YouTube will default to HTML5 player. The old style of Flash <object> embeds and Flash API are being deprecated and anyone who wants to embed a YouTube video is now encouraged to use the <iframe> API -smart enough to switch over to the technology the client supports.
YouTube had demonstrated HTML5 player about four years ago and back then, the lack of ABR which is 'Adaptive Bitrate' support in HTML5 held the team from switching over to the platform. Since then, the team has worked with leading browser vendors to enable HTML5<video> support by default. YouTube will now default to HTML5<video> in Chrome, IE11 as well as Safari 8. Beta versions of Firefox will show YouTube videos using the <video> tag as well.
There are several benefits of switching to the HTML5 for video delivery. It allows YouTube to offer more immersive video viewing experience with ABR by quickly changing the resolution and bitrate depending upon the network conditions. ABR has helped reduce buffering by over 50% all over the world. It also allows for use of VP9 video codec that allows high-quality video resolution while reducing bandwidth consumption by about 35%. It means that the 4K videos and 60FPS Full HD videos will be accessible to more people across the world and videos will start a lot faster. Ditching Flash and Silverlight allows content delivery through a single HTML5 video player across very wide range of platforms. This means you don't have to have Flash or Silverlight installed in order to see YouTube videos. WebRTC allows easier video uploading and live broadcasting.
It's about time that Flash will be completely eliminated. YouTube remained a long time and biggest user of the Flash technology and with YouTube dropping Flash - there's hardly any reason that you'd need to have it on your computer.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-#
YouTube had demonstrated HTML5 player about four years ago and back then, the lack of ABR which is 'Adaptive Bitrate' support in HTML5 held the team from switching over to the platform. Since then, the team has worked with leading browser vendors to enable HTML5<video> support by default. YouTube will now default to HTML5<video> in Chrome, IE11 as well as Safari 8. Beta versions of Firefox will show YouTube videos using the <video> tag as well.
There are several benefits of switching to the HTML5 for video delivery. It allows YouTube to offer more immersive video viewing experience with ABR by quickly changing the resolution and bitrate depending upon the network conditions. ABR has helped reduce buffering by over 50% all over the world. It also allows for use of VP9 video codec that allows high-quality video resolution while reducing bandwidth consumption by about 35%. It means that the 4K videos and 60FPS Full HD videos will be accessible to more people across the world and videos will start a lot faster. Ditching Flash and Silverlight allows content delivery through a single HTML5 video player across very wide range of platforms. This means you don't have to have Flash or Silverlight installed in order to see YouTube videos. WebRTC allows easier video uploading and live broadcasting.
It's about time that Flash will be completely eliminated. YouTube remained a long time and biggest user of the Flash technology and with YouTube dropping Flash - there's hardly any reason that you'd need to have it on your computer.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-#
