I don't know if anybody here has paid attention to this "battle" between HTML5 video and Flash video. Anyway, the thing is that HTML5 video tag will replace flash video with browser built-in video player but the problem is that they haven't decided on format yet. It's gonna be either Ogg or H264. I'm voting for Ogg because H264 has licensing fees and that might be a problem for some browser vendors.
Some people are also saying that Flash has now about 99% coverage and only about 31% of visitors have browsers that support HTML5 video. But according to
this article with proper fallback player, we can reach over 95% with HTML5.
Real kicker here is that I have always disliked java applets because they are slow, weird and java. But the article I linked recommends Cortado Java applet as fallback video player. I tried it and fuck me running, it actually takes less CPU to run than YouTube's flash player. I get about 40% CPU with
this demo clip and YouTube gives me about 68% CPU on average. This was tested on Firefox because everything sucks in Firefox so if Firefox can perform, then everything else can too.
I must say that I'm thinking about doing HTML5 video with Cortado fallback from now. I still haven't checked that what controls you can do with Cortado, does it work with streaming well and so on but I surely hope that it's good enough. No more flash, yay!
