HTML 5 <video> tag vs Flash video. What are the pros and cons?

Question

IMPORTANT UPDATE

This question was made over 9 years ago. It made sense then, it doesn\'t make it now. Flash is hard on its way out; sup

Answer 1

It will be nice to use some of the HTML 5 features... in 5-10 years from now...

We still have too many visitors using Internet Explorer 6 to ignore them, it will be quite some time before we can even move on to only testing the pages for IE7+...

Answer 2

Imagine if there was no img tag. If you want images, you have to use a 3rd party plugin, that is really slow and has no standard way to embed it in a page. You can't easily copy images in this way, and search engines basically have no clue what if it's an image or a game or anything.

Without this, no images were available.

Then imagine that a browser was released that just let you use this fancy new img tag.

The video (and audio) tag are a logical sensible way for things to work. We shouldn't need a third party plugin to use a completely standard media format.

Answer 3

Since now the browser gets the video file via regular HTTP, as compared to some obscure method defined in the SWF file (which would need to be parsed), you can now have web proxies that can also cache video files! As well as have the very browser be able to cache a video file.

Answer 4

I think the large majority of these answers condense to this: Flash is engineered mostly for the mass market, so it provides the easiest way to cover the bulk of the market, but it is deficient in covering less common and emerging platforms (i.e. shaky Linux and no iPhone). This has been the story with Flash pretty much from day one. It's practically a case study of how proprietary and OS software differ (and complement each other).

On the other hand, I think most answers are seriously underplaying the codec angle. There is one primary reason why Flash video dominates the web today: it's the only way to publish a single version of a video and expect it to be viewable by more than about half your audience. Even though the video tag looks to be designed well, as far as matching up multiple source files to the user's installed codecs, it's still difficult to know how many codecs are needed to cover what percentage of an audience, and impossible to know whether people will upgrade as new codecs emerge. Flash video has more known quantities, and a reasonably good expectation of upgrades for the large bulk of the audience.

I also kind of think that the performance angle is overstated in most answers, as well. It's true that Flash uses more CPU than any other player I have, but it also starts up more quickly - by orders of magnitude. When I come across a web page with an embedded MPG, my browser is frozen for 15+ seconds while QuickTime boots, or perhaps only 5 seconds if it was already running. (Almost as bad as PDF ;) ) Obviously Flash is less efficient in some ways, but from where I stand it's more efficient in others; like any software solution tradeoffs are involved.

Answer 5

HTML5 Pros:

1. It supports whole new DOM API for video objects, you can write script which can interact with new HTML5 tags.
2. You can detect different video format support play, pause, and track video playback.
3. Its already well supported. Firefox, opera, chrome already support chrome, video , etc... Even youtube is testing some HTML5 player.

Flash Pros/ HTML5 Cons:

1. Flash is there everywhere. So HTML5 will take lot and lots of time to catch up.
2. Flash support extensive features, let it be HW rendering, high definition video supports, Animation features it supports are simply irreplaceable(?)
3. DOM API would never replace AS2/AS3 feature already supported by flash.
4. Just count the number of professional flash developers out there... they will never switch unless HTML5 answers all their questions. There are number of flash developers who haven't switched from AS2 to AS3 yet :-)

Answer 6

You can use Flash today... it's the most realistic way to reach full-sized audiences.

(FD: I work for Adobe)