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

Adobe's Flash player (being a plugin) does not take any of the browser's privacy settings into account, while Adobe is not actively making clear to normal users what is being stored. This alone is a good reason to stop using Flash (or any video plugin) and welcome <video>.

Some details about the privacy issues (not to be confused with security issues or vulnerabilities) can be found at How to automatically remove Flash history trail? on Super User.

Like Vilx noted in the comments: these privacy issues remain when replacing Flash-video by <video>, as Flash is used in many more ways. Still, once <video> is supported then site owners who offer video (and don't use Flash in any other way) will have a choice not to burden their visitors with this poorly documented record of visited Flash-sites.

(EDIT: I replaced the details with a link to SU, which gives some more insight; some of the comments below will only make sense with respect to a previous revision.)

Answer 2

For me, it'd be very nice to have the computer built-in or another third party player play the video much more efficient than Flash can do. Not all platforms have Flash: iPhone and Android (for now at least), where the tag may work sooner rather than later. Not talking about Linux either, where Flash works quite badly.

Regarding the Internet being more semantic, it may be important to you. I'm not sure how search engines likes Google and Bing find videos but probably they just know about a bunch of Flash video implementations, so third party small players have no chance. If we are all using the same standard tag, then everybody is on a level playing field.

Answer 3

Pros:

• Ogg/Theora/Vorbis is royalty-free for all parties is the chain (the H.264 grace period for hosting H.264 ends at the end of 2015 and encoding and decoding are already subject to royalty)
• Once fallback for IE is no longer necessary, <video> will be easier than Flash
• No need for the plug-in prison—browser vendors can fix their own bugs
• Integrates with CSS effects
• Integrates with SVG effects
• Integrates with JavaScript
• Can be ported to any platform without permission from Adobe
• User can save the video to disk easily
• Can be made work safely in syndication feeds (but software not ready yet)

Cons:

• IE support for the video element has to wait until IE9; current IE-compatible Ogg fallback renderer relies on Java until the ActiveX solution or the Silverlight solution is finalized
• Safari needs XiphQT to play Ogg, because Apple hasn't shipped Theora.
• Royalty-encumbered format needed with the iPhone (but no worse than Flash)
• Can't go full-screen in every desktop implementation shipping today

Answer 4

64 bit, and Linux support will be nice. Flash still (in two thousand freaking nine) lacks in this area. Just having some real competition is always good. If the major video sites start using this along side Flash, or even in place of Flash; That will be one less proprietary program I will need. Open source means faster innovation. Give it time, people will create a way to deliver DRM protected videos with it.

Answer 5

Regarding this point:

"As for the semantics part - I understand that search engines might be able to detect videos better now, but... what will they do with them anyway? OK, so they know that there is a video in the page. And? They can't index a video! I'd like some more arguments here."

if optimized properly, a video will include a transcript, which a search engine can read, and correspondingly divulge all of the information about the video. I guess they can index the video's page? as for the value of it...i guess i won't have to watch crap I don't need, to find something I need, bcz I will know exactly what's in the video

Answer 6

1. Many Mobile Devices support today: iPhone, iPod Touch, Symbian S60, Android, etc

2. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera all support the tag (granted, you'll need to encode to 2 formats: H.264 and Ogg Theora. However, you can reuse the H.264 video with a Flash or Silverlight failsafe for older browsers and Internet Explorer