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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

They seem to be using the video-tag: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/html5.png

Don’t know what’s going on with QuickTime – maybe a fallback if your browser won’t play h.264? Does it work on Chrome without QuickTime?

(– edit: Three people [who downvoted me] seem to think that formulating a reasonable hypothesis and asking reasonable questions because of conflicting information is already too much Apple love. Or maybe they just think I’m lazy for not doing the research myself? Oh, well. Check out my other grandkid comment in this thread to see how testing my hypothesis worked out.)

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On my Ubuntu 10.04 system, I was asked to download codecs for h.264. Once the download and install was done the video played just fine.

I run midori [1] on a freebsd machine, it works somewhat well (audio problems) with html5 video on youtube. Quicktime is not a fallback, it's still the standard.

edit: forgot the link [1] http://www.twotoasts.de/

I fired up Chrome and here is what I saw: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/chrome.png

They seem to do some evil browser sniffing (I have no confirmation but that’s how it looks) and indeed use QuickTime as a fallback if you use any other browser than Safari.

Apple, listen: Thou Shalt Detect Features, Not Browsers! :)

http://i49.tinypic.com/ws0boj.png

I have midori identifying as safari - it works well enough for google to at least not give me crap for using something different, and I still see the "you need quicktime to view this" stuff.

On my Ubuntu 10.04 system, the video played fine.

Ok, now I’m really intrigued. My browser sniffing theory doesn’t seem to be the (complete) truth, either.

It does do browser sniffing, it works on his ubuntu because he's using firefox with the mplayer plugin that can read h264.

One missing detail: On Ubuntu the native multimedia plugin actually pretends to be Quicktime, so that Linux users aren't locked out of Quicktime delivered material.

(For me the video was quite low quality, possibly it doesn't fake the bitrate management stuff correctly and just gives you the lowest quality available)

Works in Ubuntu Lucid / Chrome (not Chromium) with no Quicktime installed.

Didn't work on Chrome/Win7 without installing Quicktime for me.

Did work for me on Chrome/Win7 without installing Quicktime, although I have the beta version of Chrome installed.

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