Lesson 23
HTML5 Video
Like audio, video has been widely supported in browsers for many years, but has gained increased prominence in recent years with the advent of sites such as YouTube and Netflix. Although the technical capabilities to deliver video over the Internet have been around for a long time, the increased prominence of video is largely a result of faster Internet connections because video tends to be bandwidth intensive.
As with audio, video has been supported in browsers via plugins. Adobe Flash currently dominates the video plugin market, largely due to the overwhelming success of YouTube, but many other plugins also support video, such as QuickTime and Silverlight.
HTML5 provides native support for video inside a browser. The HTML5 video capabilities are essentially the same as the audio capabilities, but obviously the format types for video are quite different from the format types for audio. As with audio, the HTML5 standard does not specify a default video format that all browsers must support.
HTML5 video has received more attention than HTML5 audio, and received an extra boost when Apple declined to support Adobe Flash on phones and tablets, suggesting instead that HTML5 should be used in its place. As you will see later in this lesson, there are still some impediments to the commercialization of HTML5 video, but it continues to gain traction. Even YouTube now supports HTML5 video for much of its content.
File Formats
Video formats are slightly more complex ...
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