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 Channel Futures

Open Source


HTML5 Video on Ubuntu

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • May 25, 2010

With my professional life having quieted down a lot recently, I finally got a chance to play with something I’ve been meaning to try since the winter: HTML5 video on Ubuntu.  The results made me pretty happy.

Steve Jobs and I don’t agree on much.  But one of the rare points on which we see eye-to-eye is Flash.  Jobs’s recent spate of highly public litanies against Adobe may be characteristically hypocritical (Jobs has famously condemned Adobe for being closed and proprietary), but they’re also accurate, insofar as Jobs points to flash as buggy, slow and insecure.

True, Adobe has done a lot to improve flash with the 10.1 release, which finally provides video offloading so that playing a YouTube video won’t give your CPU a heart attack.  But that feature, of course, is supported only Windows; Linux users are left out in the cold.  And we don’t have anyone of Steve Jobs’s stature to advocate for us.

As a result, my six-month-old netbook with a hyperthreaded Atom processor and 2 gigabytes of memory can’t play Hulu videos at its fullscreen 1024×600 resolution.  The Core 2 Duo in my desktop can, but only with great effort.

HTML5 to the rescue

HTML5, of course, has the potential to save us all from the misery of CPU-gobbling videos embedded using flash.  The <video> tag in the new standard allows websites to embed video that can be decoded much more easily.

Granted, HTML5 video remains encumbered by patent issues, since the H.264 codec is not free.  Then again, neither is Flash.  In an ideal world we’d all be using Ogg codecs for our multimedia files and OpenDocument format for our documents, but the world is not ideal.

With the licensing caveats of HTML5 video in mind, I downloaded Google Chrome so that I could give the new format a try.  Unfortunately, Firefox doesn’t support HTML5 video using the H.264 format, precisely because of the patent issues surrounding the H.264 codec.

There’s not much to say about my actual experience playing HTML5 video in Chrome, other than that it worked great, and with little effort.  After enabling HTML5 on Youtube, videos were decoded extremely smoothly and with only about half the CPU load of flash videos.  Vimeo also worked seamlessly with HTML5 enabled.  The only drawback on both sites is that fullscreen playback is not yet supported, due to browser limitations.

Much to my dismay, Hulu has yet to announce plans to support HTML5 in desktop browsers.  If that changes, I’ll have gotten everything I want out of life.

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Mobility Open Source

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8 comments

  1. Avatar Rob May 25, 2010 @ 7:13 pm
    Reply

    Odd, you seem to have published an article about HTML5 video tag and failed to mention Google’s recent announcement about WebM open source codec. Hopefully all major browsers will support it and put the H.264 debate behind us. I’m looking at you IE (although hopefully if youtube gets IE users to download an addin for WebM then that will ease the transition).

  2. Avatar toby May 26, 2010 @ 1:10 am
    Reply

    Wow man, I really expected more from you. I can’t believe you just said “Firefox doesn’t support HTML5 video”. It most certainly does! It doesn’t support the H.264 codec, but it supports HTML5 video using the Ogg Theora codec.

    There is no single “standard” video codec for HTML5 video, neither H.264 nor Theora nor WebM. Firefox amp; Opera support Theora, Safari supports H.264, Chrome supports both, and IE might support something someday.

    Please don’t confuse the issue further by using “HTML5 video” and “H.264” interchangeably; that’s a major disservice to the entire open philosophy of Ubuntu.

  3. Avatar Christopher Tozzi May 26, 2010 @ 1:34 am
    Reply

    Rob: this went to press before the WebM announcement, but that’s a certainly valid point and Google’s initiative is very relevant for the free-software community. We’ll continue to watch it as it develops.

    toby: good catch. I wasn’t deliberately trying to denigrate Firefox; that was just an oversight. I updated the wording to make it clearer that HTML5 is not just H.264.

    When this was written, Firefox couldn’t play videos on YouTube and most other sites using HTML5 because those sites only supported H.264; as of now, that’s no longer the case, obviously, as a result of the WebM announcement.

  4. Avatar snkiz May 26, 2010 @ 11:32 am
    Reply

    I just bought sempirion 140 for a budget upgrade, (Yes I finally retired my PIII.) I was expecting something similar to the experience with my wife’s atom netbook (Laggy but capable.) and I was shocked to find it far out strips the atom, with the same amount of ram. Fullscreen flash is not a problem for me, though the little AMD is certainly working for it. The codec issue is a real shame, as Chrome’s parent project Chromium is also missing H.264 due to patents. As IMO Chromium is slightly snappier without the Google touch, and offers more control.

  5. Avatar Ionut May 28, 2010 @ 2:00 pm
    Reply

    you are not well informed. please before spreading your article, do some research. the part i’m referring is firefox not supporting h264.

  6. Avatar Christopher Tozzi May 28, 2010 @ 2:49 pm
    Reply

    Ionu: for a variety of reasons outlined by Mozilla engineer Mike Shaver at http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/, h.264 is not supported by Firefox, especially not on Linux. If you have evidence to the contrary please share it.

  7. Avatar yman May 30, 2010 @ 6:16 am
    Reply

    Firefox will support Ogg and WebM. Chrome will support h.264, Ogg, and WebM. IE will support h.264, VC-1, and WebM. Safari will support h.264.

  8. Avatar Rob June 1, 2010 @ 5:53 pm
    Reply

    Christopher Tozzi: Apologies, I didn’t realise the articles here go to the printing press. I thought it was web only hence it seemed odd that you posted an article days after a big announcement yet failed to mention that.

    Must be really annoying for you to write something then within days the scene change so much (fingers crossed for the success of WebM and the end of h.264 vs Ogg).

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