Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 17th Sep 2009 18:39 UTC
The draft of the HTML5 specification has been under discussion for a while now, but despite the fact that it's not yet finished, all major browsers have implemented at least the most important aspects of it - except Microsoft. The company did provide substantive criticism of the specification in early August, but now the company has also endorsed the video and audio tags.
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Member since:
2007-09-08
Lucky for you.
On my Macbook, playing a Flash video pegs one CPU core at 100%. Not just videos - normal Flash animations do that too, although slightly less so. Doesn't matter if it's on a visible page or not - even a Flash animation in a background tab does it. When browsing, particularly without adblock or equivalent, I can easily end up with both CPU cores pegged at 100% CPU usage.
Not only does this slow the system to a crawl (including making Flash videos stutter), it also drains the battery much faster, and causes the machine to heat up.
That aside, it doesn't even work properly. The most reliable implementation of Flash video I've ever seen is Youtube. Even that sometimes gets stuck for no reason, refuses to load videos, gets confused about how much video has been buffered, and suffers from hitching. Forget watching HD videos. Forget watching videos in full-screen. No hardware acceleration, no possibility of hardware accelerated scaling...
Not only that, but I tend to have a browser crash every couple of days. I've examined the backtraces a few times - the culprit is always Flash. I've had exactly one instance of Firefox crashing without the Flash plugin being at fault.
The Linux version of Flash is in a far worse state. Same basic problems (crashy, slow, uses far too much CPU time), but it's even slower. How about all those platforms where Flash isn't even available? Phones, for example (and no, neither Flash 7 nor Flash Lite count).
The Windows version of Flash at least doesn't crash as much, and doesn't use 100% CPU for watching a postage-stamp sized video. At high resolutions, full-screen video is still unusable. It's still unreliable.
The Quicktime plugin on a Mac has none of these problems, even when playing WMV files. Neither do the Windows Media Player or Quicktime plugins on Windows. Neither do native HTML5 video in Safari, Firefox or Opera, on any platform.
It's kind of dumb that the multitude of browser plugins Flash video was supposed to replace actually work far better than Flash does. Hell, even Silverlight does a better job than Flash does, with the same video codec.