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

Asked 2009-07-06T13:14:11.417
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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; <video> support is ubiquitous, including mobile devices. Almost anything that Flash could do, HTML can now do too. HTML won, Flash lost. If you're pondering on how to embed video in your page, just use <video> and don't give it a second thought. This question is only preserved for historical value.

Original question

Seems like the new <video> tag is all the hype these days, especially since Firefox now supports it. News of this are popping up in blogs all over the place, and everyone seems to be excited. But what about?

As much as I searched I could not find anything that would make it better than the good old Flash video. In fact, I see only problems with it:

  • It will still be some time before all the browsers start supporting it, and much more time before most people upgrade;
  • Flash is available already and everyone has it;
  • You can couple Flash with whatever fancy UI you want for controlling the playback. I gather that the tag will be controllable as well (via JavaScript probably), but will it be able to go fullscreen?

The only two pros for a <video> tag that I can see are:

  • It is more "semantic" - which probably holds no importance to a whole lot of people, including me;
  • It is not dependent on a single commercial 3rd party entity (Adobe) - which I also don't see as a compelling reason to switch, because free players and video converters are already available, and Adobe is not hindering the whole process in any way (it's not in their interests even).

So... what's the big deal?

Added:

OK, so there is one more Pro... maybe. Support for mobile devices. Hard to say though. A number of thoughts race through my he

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1 Answer

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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.

answered 2009-07-06T13:36:35.750

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