YouTube ditches Adobe Flash for HTML5
It has happened. The day that we were anticipating in years has happened. Adobe’s Flash has just lost a massive client and that is YouTube. Starting today, YouTube videos will not be played by Adobe Flash but will be using <video> tag that cam in HTML5. The limitations related to performance was the reason why Google had to delay the switch till 2015. Chrome, IE11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox will now use HTML5 code to play YouTube videos.
Google has worked with web browser vendors for nearly 4 years to perfect the experience. There is no visible difference in the interface and you will get to know the difference when you right click on the video window. Thanks to the Adaptive BitRate streaming, Google is able to reduce buffering by more than 50% globally and by 80% on congested networks. MediaSource extensions that improved the playback quality can also enabled live streaming in gaming consoles and for devices like Chromecast and web browsers. HTML5 also relies on VP9 (open source) video codec that provides higherly quality videos and average bandwidth reduction of 35%. This would mean that far less data is downloaded at destination when one opens 4K/1080p videos that usually consume lot of bandwidth.
Other features include Encrypted Media Extensions, Common Encryption, WebRTC, better FullScreen viewing experience, move to <iframe> embed code.
