YouTube puts up beta of HTML5 video (no Flash required)


YouTube announced Wednesday it released an experimental HTML5 player for limited usage on the video sharing site.

HTML5 supports audio video playback without any special plug-ins such as Adobe Flash. The standard allows H.264 video to passed through directly to the browser. This is pretty cool stuff and it seems to be working reasonable well. To utilize the HTML5 features, you'll need a compliant browser which includes Apple Safari, Google Chrome, or ChromeFrame for Microsoft IE.

The video playback features are limited to certain videos right now. Specifically videos with advertising or captions as those are handled through the Flash interface. Also, it appears high-def and high-quality versions of the video are not supported. YouTube promises to expand capabilities down the road and this is their first big swipe at the project.

HTML5 option can be enabled via a page, and once enabled, videos should show up in the HTML5 player rather than Flash.

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be supported with Safari on the iPhone OS. After enabling the HTML5, clicking the videos still launches the YouTube player. We assume here the YouTube page recognized the visitor as using an iPhone and overrides these settings. Also, YouTube has a specific Syndication option for video authors that enable videos for mobile and TV devices. Hopefully further down the road we'll see support for this to give video playback of without leaving Safari.

Introducing YouTube HTML5 Supported Videos