Longtail has written a piece on the State of HTML5 Video.
HTML5 has entered the online video market, which is both exciting and challenging for developers in the industry. With the HTML5 specification and the various browser implementations in constant flux, we at LongTail Video spend a signficant amount of time understanding the limitations of the technology and optimizing our own products for HTML5.
Re: The State Of HTML5 Video
I just read it earlier today. Annoyingly Android dropped support for HLS again. MP4 picked up by Firefox though it seems, so that’s at least good thing! But HTML5 major problem is still streaming.
Re: The State Of HTML5 Video
We moved to JWPlayer 6 when it came out, and we set the default mode to mp4, instead of flash. So, if you can play mp4 that is what is used. If you can’t the player falls back to it’s flash player with our flv files.
I looked at CDN stats and there were basically no streams of the flash files at all. To test this, last week we only uploaded mp4 versions of our movies and didn’t upload any flash versions at all. So, if you had a flash-only browser, you were unable to stream our movie at all.
Guess how many customer service complaints we had? None. While I get we are a smaller player, and maybe if we were Sean Cody size we would have more complaints, I think it’s interesting for us to drop flash at this point and tell whomever writes in that it’s time they update their browser.
On another note, we’ve been beta testing HLS and it seems really buggy on anything BUT iOS. Specifically I am talking about Safari in OSX, where it should perform really well. I want to move to it, but it seems like a whole lot of change for just iOS devices. Is anyone else doing HLS streaming, and it is just on iOS devices (versus Safari)?
I am now only providing mp4 on my site. Download as well as in browser player. Not one single complaint in the last 3 months I’ve been doing it.
So happy I’m not making 7 different files anymore. Nobody was downloading anything but the large sized file. I checked my stats too.
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We have had mp4 and no Flash for streaming for quite a while now and no complaints
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I’m still confused how HTML5 is supposed to handle streaming. Streaming is such a huge thing now and having no support for it seems a bit mad.
[QUOTE=Stocky Dudes;133259]I am now only providing mp4 on my site. Download as well as in browser player. Not one single complaint in the last 3 months I’ve been doing it.
So happy I’m not making 7 different files anymore. Nobody was downloading anything but the large sized file. I checked my stats too.[/QUOTE]
Did you manage to get JW Player working? After using JW Player and using MP4 I’ve had no complaints, obviously I don’t allow direct download except as an fall-back option for users without java installed.
Interesting to hear that people no longer use the smaller format videos.
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At this point I would like to ask all sponsors / programs to provide their preview videos in mp4 format. Many do this already, Nakedsword f.e. switched this week from flv to mp4, but there are still some out there, who just offer flv or wmv videos.
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So what happened to formats like webm and ogg, they didn’t make the team?
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Webm seems to be the next thing because I believe is an open-source format not like mp4 plus its ability to play 3d videos.
At this time we provide our promo videos in mp4 format, only do .flv or .wmv if a webmaster requires, but honestly we didn’t have many requests, just a few.
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I just added mp4 preview downloads to our affiliate section, in addition to flv downloads. (dominicford.com/affiliates).
great suggestion!
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[QUOTE=BelAmiOnline;133264]We have had mp4 and no Flash for streaming for quite a while now and no complaints[/QUOTE] Same here.
Would love to start playing with HLS, but it make me nervous.