YouTube doesn't suck ... finally.

MagicBoy · 9 Feb 2010 at 02:11

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Finally - the vast majority of YouTube video doesn't need CPU hogging battery stealing annoying Adobe Flash when you use Safari4 (or apparently the new Firefox).

Flash - 50% CPU
HTML5 - 12% CPU

Next on my hitlist list - BBC iPlayer... Get rid of shoddy flash and they'll make a real dent in this countries carbon footprint! Just give us Mac users h264 like the iPhone users get. Thanks.

Stupot_ · 9 Feb 2010 at 02:25

Ooooh. So does this mean if I download safari 4 my old Power PC mac won't die everytime I go on youtube?

mr.sly · 9 Feb 2010 at 03:13

Not supported in Chromium for some weird reason.

Feek · 9 Feb 2010 at 06:05

No good in firefox either

Maccy · 9 Feb 2010 at 07:37

Feek said:
No good in firefox either

Aye, that's a shame.

MagicBoy · 9 Feb 2010 at 09:47

Stupot_ said:
Ooooh. So does this mean if I download safari 4 my old Power PC mac won't die everytime I go on youtube?

Dunno, try it and let us know!

mr.sly · 9 Feb 2010 at 14:25

Ah, it seems only Chrome has a licence to use the h.264 codec which doesn't apply to Chromium.

hyper_piper45 · 9 Feb 2010 at 15:41

mr.sly said:
Ah, it seems only Chrome has a licence to use the h.264 codec which doesn't apply to Chromium.

Well that sucks.

JAMAL · 9 Feb 2010 at 17:52

I've been using this for a few weeks now and its much better, jobs is right, flash really is crap and the sooner its gone the better.

mr.sly · 9 Feb 2010 at 18:09

hyper_piper45 said:
Well that sucks.

Yup, seems to be the reason Firefox won't licence the h.264 codec as well because then any derivative built off Firefox won't have the licence creating a split market.

Spyhop · 9 Feb 2010 at 18:48

Been using it on YouTube for a while, though quite a few of the videos are still shown in Flash.

Flash sucks.

nav... · 9 Feb 2010 at 22:25

MagicBoy said:
Next on my hitlist list - BBC iPlayer... Get rid of shoddy flash and they'll make a real dent in this countries carbon footprint! Just give us Mac users h264 like the iPhone users get. Thanks.

Being in Australia I can't test this*, but could you not just use the develop menu in Safari to set your User agent to be mobile Safari?? And thus get the h264 streams?

* but it is a 32 degree Summer day so all balances out

MagicBoy · 9 Feb 2010 at 22:29

I seem to recall it worked for a while using a user agent hack in Firefox, then the BBC patched the code up. That was a while back tho.

NickK · 9 Feb 2010 at 22:57

Been using it tonight and it seems no different although the CPU use is lower "I AM SAVING MONNAY!"

nav... · 9 Feb 2010 at 23:41

Just tried it. Can't see a video because of my IP, but it at least loads the mobile site.

RobH · 10 Feb 2010 at 01:10

mr.sly said:
Not supported in Chromium for some weird reason.

Feek said:
No good in firefox either

The lack of support in Firefox is due to the HTML 5 draft specification not specifying which video formats browsers should support in the video tag and Firefox adheres to this specification.

Both Google and Apple have decided to make use of the H.264 coded which is not an open format and they have had to licence it (as it is covered by many patents). Mozilla being an open source organisation and Firefox being open source can't adopt this solution. It remains to be seen what video format will be chosen for the HTML 5 specification, there aren't really any good candidates at the moment.

geekyEd · 10 Feb 2010 at 22:51

nav... said:
Just tried it. Can't see a video because of my IP, but it at least loads the mobile site.

I didn't know I could do that! Sweeeet

EDIT: It doesn't fool youtube though, click for flash is everywhere!

Fillado · 10 Feb 2010 at 23:48

RobH said:
The lack of support in Firefox is due to the HTML 5 draft specification not specifying which video formats browsers should support in the video tag and Firefox adheres to this specification.

Originally it specified Ogg Theora (which Firefox uses). Then Apple kicked up a fuss because they clearly have a lot of development behind H.264 so now we have this un-specified mess.

In other words: Flash is going nowhere. Despite what Jobs thinks.

pinki104 · 10 Feb 2010 at 23:50

ive never had a problem with youtube anyway or it has never took up a noticable amount of resources

MagicBoy · 11 Feb 2010 at 00:02

pinki104 said:
ive never had a problem with youtube anyway or it has never took up a noticable amount of resources

Flash was originally created to allow for animations and limited interactivity such as menu bars in webpages. It then bloated out of control and started doing video. It's an easy way of getting cross platform video out there, but as it's not optimised to utilise the hardware assistance built into the vast majority of PCs it's very inefficient and prone to dropped frames and audio sync issues. With a dedicated player I reckon a G3 mac would play the type of clips you get on YouTube with no worries. Instead it's stealing 50% of a dual core machine running at 10x the clockspeed.