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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

This seems cool. It's not working for me though, the video never plays and the track scan and volume buttons have a blue border around them. I'm on FF 3.5.5

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Firefox does not support MPEG-4 video because of patent licensing issues. Firefox supports Ogg files with Theora video and Vorbis audio. Google has an agreement with MPEG LA and is therefore able to ship an MPEG-4 AVC decoder with Google Chrome.

You need to manually press the play button. The numbers are a lie (0:00/0:00) and the blue border only appears in FF (silly thing requires a border=0 which I'll add later). It may take a while on slower internet and some videos do not have an MP4 upload on YouTube. However, the YouTube slider does work and you can use it to skip to any part of the movie.

Wow. That sure is a barrage of caveats. Nevertheless, this is awesome. I had the exact same idea last night and I could not sleep either; I put on a movie instead so kudos :) This is a really great idea and based on the shortcomings of Flash you described in your article it sounds like Google should have been doing this anyway. If they can take advantage of a new technology to better serve their users, why not?

Only browser I got your app working in was Chrome. What browser were you primarily testing the application in? What version? Because Firefox just released an update this morning and it could very well be the culprit.

I not only could not get Firefox (3.5.5), IE7, or Safari to work with your HTML5 YouTube app, but I could not get YouTube's app to work either; I hope this fact mitigates your worries.

Main development was with Safari, WebKit, Chrome, and Firefox on OS X. Couldn't get it to work with Camino.

Tested as well on Chrome for Windows. Of course, Internet Explorer doesn't work.

EDIT: Sorry, guess that's the effect of an all-nighter. It actually doesn't load in Firefox for me, either.

Well I'm not gonna blame you for it not working in Firefox. I've actually had to re-write client-side code (generally just quick hacks, similar to your project) solely for Firefox patching some sort of quirk or behavior change into their browser. It can get especially annoying if you're always testing with the most recent version.

Nevertheless its a neat app. ;)

I've been told it actually works on the iPhone and plays videos that fail to load due to format problems the normal way. =]

Well it doesn't seem to work on Iron (which is essentially Chrome) on Windows for me.

Thanks. I did press the play button and nothing is playing. I just copied the whole youtube link into the box before watching. That's what you're supposed to do, correct?

Try this, http://www.youtube.com/html5 and if this will not play then it is most likely an issue with Firefox; try installing Chrome and see if that resolves the playback issue. I was experiencing the same issue in Firefox 3.5.5

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