Portland, OR: Adobe Flash seems to be ubiquitous, and it’s used by everyone from the London Olympics to your neighborhood brewpub’s website.
But in video technology circles, everyone hates Adobe Flash. Indeed, even Adobe is moving away from Flash. HTML5 video promised that it would be the one universal answer for Web video, but Web browser makers, such as Mozilla, have problems with it.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Scott Davis, founder of ThirstyHead, a training and consulting company, argued at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) that HTML5 Video is ready to go today.
Davis opened by saying that, unlike closed video standards, HTML5 video can play on a wide variety of devices – everything from smartphones to HDTVs. It achieves this by not supporting any single video format or container. With this multiple-choice approach, HTML5 makes a “standard” by defining a standard way to embed video in webpages using the <video> element.
But, before we can talk about that we need to know Web streaming video basics.