Over 50% of web users now support HTML5 Video | Hacker News Reader

Over 50% of web users now support HTML5 Video

videojs.com

74 pointsHeff17 comments

50% of desktop web users. The encoding landscape is considerably different in the mobile world, and will be until Android tablets are both released and then adopted in large enough quantities. Currently though, most video is still in h.264 format and either served via Quicktime [edit: Media Framework] for iOS, or Flash for PC.

Good point - I am getting really excited about some of the new players and ideas in the html5 video space. Just applied for the beta of http://sublimevideo.net/ - very promising, html5 video w/ flash fallback and mobile support.

Sublime is great, but closed-source and is going to charge for use. Many of the open source players beyond just VideoJS are just as good, IMO. Also depends on what you need.

Yes, it's definitely different in the mobile world. Mobile is still a very small portion of overall web use though. It's difficult to tell if StatCounter includes all mobile browsers in their overall stats, but they do at least include the iPad. Either way it would barely make a dent in overall numbers. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2009...

You can see a comparison of mobile OSs here: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-200912-20101...

I'd have to say the benefit of html5 video is greater on mobile devices and Macs, domains where Flash performance has traditionally been terrible, and where a content provider will most likely spend effort in patching UX.

It'll be a bit until WebM chipsets come out for the incoming flood of Android tablets, and since h.264 is the easiest target, I can't see the current statistics really influencing the encoding of video until Android can make a dent. Flash video works great for the 90% of computers running Windows and the plugin, so why fix something that works?

Wait, what’s the fraction on Mobile? Because it’s not like the percentage of mobile web users who have full Flash is anywhere near 50%, it’s gotta be less than that!

Er, I'm pretty certain iOS supports HTML5 video just fine as it is. QuickTime doesn't exist on iOS.

You're right, I meant Media Player framework.

Before you get really excited, I ask you to rewrite the title and re-consider: 50% of web users still have no HTML5 video support.

I hope that idea you had is no longer still itching to get out. There.

Uh, no. :) I understand where with all the hype you might expect HTML5 video to have more support, but it's still a new technology, and requires that browsers build in support and then users upgrade to the newest versions. I imagine with the release of IE9 we'll see a big jump, and hopefully MS will be more aggressive in pushing out that update.

Oh yes, because it’s SO HARD to support both HTML5 video and Flash as a fallback </sarcasm>

That is, if you limit yourself to one format only. If you provide Flash then it's probably H.264. In that case it's not 50% but 10% support for HTML5 Video. If you want to offer HTML5 Video for the 50% you need at least to transcode to Theora. And that, depending on scale, is not so trivial anymore.

Though that starts to look better if you consider good adoption of IE9 and Firefox on Windows with Microsoft's plugin.

You may not be able to just feed Flash WebM files: Adobe has only committed to supporting the VP8 codec, not Vorbis or Matroska (http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_f...). I wonder if the primary purpose Flash video will be making timeshifting impractical for normal people through weird formats and protocols.

50% of people who visit sites having StatCounter thingie present. Not quite a data to consider.

"In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion hits per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites."

Seems like enough to draw conclusions from.

That really depend on what kind of member sites we are talking about no?

Is this different from saying 50% of desktop web users have browsers that support html5?

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