[whatwg] Chipset support is a good argument

[Lino Mastrodomenico]

2009/7/6 Kristof Zelechovski <giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl>:
> Small authors are hardly an alternative to YouTube because they use YouTube
> (or a similar service) to publish their content.
[snip]
> In short, if you do not have the know-how to serve your video content, you
> will just use YouTube and never bother.

I am a small author and I have basic knowledge about how to encode a
video. it's really not hard using a GUI frontend for ffmpeg2theora;
it's pretty much only a matter of selecting a good compromise between
encoding quality, resolution and bitrate, checking the result and
trying again with different resolution or quality until you get what
you want. You usually get subsequent videos right at the first try.

But in the past I've used YouTube to host my videos because I don't
have the know-how to write a Flash video *player* that works on
different browsers, with workarounds for bugs that may crash old (but
still widely used) versions of the plugin, alternative encodings for
old plugins that don't support H.264, etc.

The problem is not that I don't know how to encode a video, it's that
I don't know how to write a video player that works as well as the
YouTube one. I know that there are free ones around, but in my limited
tests they don't work well with old Flash versions and are more
complicated than a simple video tag.

HTML5 solves this problem because now the player is embedded in the
browser, so I started using <video src="whatever.ogv"> and hiding the
YouTube <object> blurb inside it as a fallback. This should work with
every browser (except maybe Safari without XiphQT???), gives me the
freedom to choose exactly the resolution I want and a bit of
Independence from YT, which is good (think about cases like a troll
flagging my videos: AFAIK YouTube automatically removes videos after a
certain number of flags).

With HTML5 video I can also get better quality because the videos
don't have to go through two lossy encodings and I can also push the
bitrate up a bit, since my website doesn't have a billion visitors
each day.

>  And if you do have, you will not
> begin with reading the HTML specification either.

I did. And after reading it I decided to use the autoplay and controls
attributes.

Except the missing reference to Ogg/Theora, I found the spec much more
informative and useful than other tutorials found on the interwebs
that suggested using autoplay="false" to disable autoplay (completely
wrong, of course) or presented examples using WMV-encoded videos. Yes
I'm talking about w3schools.

ciao

-- 
Lino Mastrodomenico