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Comment by ammmir | Hacker News Reader

youtube could as well detect if you're running chrome os and use their HTML5 player instead of the Flash-based one. any idea why they don't do this by default on supported browsers? last time i checked, the HTML5 player was opt-in.

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It's basically just not considered release-quality yet, as far as I know. The Flash player is mature and YouTube has been fine with it for a long time.

I am not sure but I think they can't show ads in HTML5 version of the player - thats why they have it as opt-in, I might be wrong.

But what the hell Adobe.. for every new device that flash runs, they need 2-3 years to optimize it. Flash needs to die!!

They've been able to start making some money from YouTube ads in-video, and it seems like they scaled back their whole HTML5 effort for YouTube after that... Then they decided to integrate Flash into Chrome, which I'm sure played a part in the decision.

I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression that only a small portion of the total video base has been converted to a <video> friendly format.

This is not true. The majority of any online video sites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc) use h.264-encoded MP4 delivered to a Flash player on the client-side. So the video is ready to be put in <video> tag, at least in browsers supporting h.264 (sorry Firefox).

If you use the YouTube5 plugin for Safari to browser YouTube you will know this.

The problem is they currently have no way to insert ads and other stuff (like subtitles) into video if it is not played in Flash.

I thought one advantage of <video> is that regular HTML can be used to display content like ads?

Two issues:

* Then it's easier to block by AdBlock

* Advanced sync'ing between ads and video (required for many ads and features like subtitles) is not possible in HTML5

Why not? There's timing events and etc that should operate at a high enough resolution for any such syncing.

Interesting. I must have missed the timeupdate events.

Seems someone has already implemented a nice player with sync'ing subtitles and slides: http://johndyer.name/post/HTML5-Video-Player-with-Slides-and...

This is cool! Thanks for the update!

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