Ask HN: Why is migration to HTML5 from Flash for videos not yet a reality? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is migration to HTML5 from Flash for videos not yet a reality?

2 pointswinteriscoming4 comments

One of things that I keep hearing is that Flash has too many vulnerabilities and it's better to move away from it. I see that Flash prominently gets used for video rendering in browsers. I also hear that HTML5 has the necessary support for native video rendering and is an alternative to using Flash.

However, almost all other major websites still use Flash. Youtube does have optional HTML5 support and works fine (for me). But a majority of other prominent websites (twitter for example) still seem to use Flash.

I don't have much knowledge when it comes to video rendering in browsers, but is it that difficult to just switch to HTML5 for video rendering? Are there some technical challenges that this migration is delayed? Personally I haven't used Flash, in browser, for anything other than basic video playing abilities (play, pause, stop, change volume), so I would expect it wouldn't be much of a ask for HTML5 to support this.

- cost of replacing flash with HTML 5 video player, requires testing, and a developer to provide

- DRM

- requires messaging current users about the change, providing fallback in case of non compatibility, user-support and tracking of failure

The current website works well enough with flash, and using flash does not impact traffic ( most of desktop users have flash ). Business incentive to move to more modern technology compared to the cost ( replacing/ implementing/ support ).

>> - DRM

Curious about this one. Do you mean using HTML5 might make it easier to copy the content? And using Flash prevents/makes it difficult to do that? Or is there more to it?

A flash client could use adobe DRM ( test here https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/protected-video-cont... ), or even use a negotiation scheme that is harder to reverse engineer compare to javascript.

current HTML5 standard do not defined a DRM standard.

I would like to add that it is only a small part of the issue as the average user would not probably care but as you can see here ( http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html ), downloading video is one right-click away.

Youtube does some clever event interception to prevent this.

But again the cost of a developer to replace the existing system, re-encoding the videos ( sources might have been lost ), might be too high for a "normal" website to update their content.

Thank you, that's informative.

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