HTML 5′s “real deal” video player

John Gruber writes,

Seriously, this is the real deal — full-screen H.264 playback with no Flash, no browser plugins, full iPhone OS support, and sane CPU usage, better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.

Have a look for yourself.

What I experienced is nothing like Gruber describes. I saw my browser lock up and my CPU usage spike and stay spiked while the video played. I sent it to Matthew and he experienced the same performance issues.

I look forward to better implementations and support from browsers. Better performance, real full screen, sharable implementations.

Comments (7)

comments

  • Eric

    It’s mildly surprising to me that Gruber would be so hyperbolic. “better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash”?? I tested the player in Safari and Chrome, and in both cases, it was slow (both in playback and response), and in Chrome, the playhead stopped updating after I scrubbed it.

    I’m sure these is just a symptoms of the early state of the browser implementations and the developers’ approach, but for Gruber to write it up like it trumps the Youtube (flash-based) player experience is ridiculous (I’d add ‘irresponsible’ if he were some kind of actual journalist.)

  • http://www.daveglanzproductions.com Dave Glanz

    I’ll be the voice of dissent here.

    I played the following clip in Safari 4.04 (Mac OS X 10.6.2 – 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2 gigs of RAM), and got the following results in my activity monitor.

    Flash Player: http://www.daveglanzproductions.com/youtube-flash.jpg

    HTML 5 Player: http://www.daveglanzproductions.com/youtube-html5.jpg

    The CPU usage stayed between 13 and 25 percent for me. It seems to play just as well on my desktop at work.

    It’d be nice, of course, if the HTML 5 player had full screen capabilities, but I’m sure that’s not too far off.

  • 8dot3

    He has been on a tirade against Flash for some time now.

    It’s the idea that somehow once HTML 5 is here performance issues will be gone that drives me nuts. Flash isn’t the reason we have annoying ads and bad code. People are.

  • Ryan

    Dave, I have no doubt that this will work sooner than later, especially in Apple’s own browser.

  • http://www.jonathandean.com/2010/02/html-5s-real-deal-video-pla/ HTML 5’s “real deal” video pla… « Jonathan Dean

    [...] on twitter: HTML 5's "real deal" video player http://www.eightdotthree.net/2010/02/html-5s-real-deal-video-player/ /via @8dot3    [more [...]

  • Rob

    I dug around a bit and I think I found the reason it’s using so much CPU time. The video is 1280×544.

    http://medias.jilion.com/sublimevideo/dartmoor.mp4

  • Ryan

    The video playing on its own in my browser hovered around 70% CPU usage.

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