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

My belief for pros:

• It's catching the HTML standard up to the current practical uses of the web.
• It seems like it would be easier/better to get mobile devices to support the video/audio tag rather than porting Flash to the devices.
• Ogg is an open standard, while Adobe controls Flash.
• I've already seen in some places people putting up solutions to have a fall through, meaning if your browser doesn't support video/audio tags, it will use flash.
• Easier interaction with standard HTML elements and javascript.

My biggest con would be that Ogg is a bit behind in terms of compression and quality. But I would imagine it's being worked on. More importantly, if more people start adopting it, more people will likely join the the work on Ogg to make it better.

Competition is key as well, as there is no major player forcing Adobe to really do anything with Flash. So Adobe can control the market in terms of video content on the web.

Answer 2

Pros:

1. You can easily use the tag and let it degrade to flash or other filetypes/codecs for backwards compatibility without using javascript.
   • Doesn't need a proprietary plug-in
   • Is platform-independent while flash is not (see nr. 2)
   • Using it will encourage other browser vendors to implement it (read as IE)
   • The tag has semantic meaning.
   • Comes built into the browser.
   • No vendor lockin

Cons:

1. It's a part of an unfinished standard.
   • A very small percentage of installed browsers support it <-- not an issue (See pro nr. 1)
   • Browser vendors have yet to agree on a standard codec <-- not an issue either, see link in nr. 1)

Answer 3

I would say the definite pro of using <video> instead of Flash is that I will be able to watch videos in my browser without having it crash or go crazy slow. I use 64bit OpenBSD, so gnash is all I can get and I only enable it when I'm feeling really risky because most of the time I'll come across a flash banner ad and my browser(firefox 3.5) will crash.

And my mobile phone browser doesn't support flash, yet it supports the video tag(and it's not an overly "fancy" phone either).

Answer 4

• The user has control of the UI: they can choose which browser they would like to download and use, and depending on how it works(I'm not sure of the details, but I'm familiar with the concept), even keep their browser and just choose the handler npapi plugin for it. How many times have you been stuck using a shitty actionscript video control interface because the devs of the site you're on were too lazy to do it right (or use flowplayer). Power to the users!, I say.

• Its open source. Now, i'm not RMS or anything, and its nothing to do with ethics or anything else like that, but OSS is just the more efficient, better way to go. It produces better code.

• Better platform support. Right now, Linux + flash = bad. Adobe's the only one who can do anything about it. This sucks.

• like you said, more semantic.

Answer 5

I've been reading around this recently for a site I'm building now. I've gone with Flash video for now, because the launch is pretty soon. Also, we're on a shared hosting environment, so all video conversion has to be done before the video is uploaded. I don't want to ask the client to upload two versions of each video.

But, ultimately, I do want to switch to open video. It looks pretty cool. I've seen a demo which uses javascript to overlay subtitles on a video, degrading gracefully in the absence of javascript to a text transcript below the video. (I think that was on A List Apart.) And Mozilla have some fun demos up. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/google-dailymotion-endorse-html-5-and-standards-based-video.ars

Answer 6

Current state of Flash is:

Flash Desktop platforms:

• IE
• Microsoft Edge
• Safari (Mac)
• Chrome
• FF
• Opera

Mobile browsers:

• No

So you can't use Flash video on mobile browsers because Flash Player is not pre-installed by default.

Optimal way - using HTML5 video with Flash fallback for those browsers where HTML5 video is not supported.