Just spent and evening trying out some of this HTML5 nonsense for video. On the whole the night was incredibly frustrating, but I have learned a few things:
- OGG Sucks: Sorry Mozilla. I’m all for open standards and I love my Firefox, but damn, OGG is a piece of crap video format. I may as well go back to FLV with Sorenson Squeeze. The videos look like shit and they are 2-3 times as large, not to mention that there are next to no encoding tools for any OS other than Linux. Took me an hour to find one for Mac that didn’t require command line. Sorry Mozilla, I’m with Apple, Google and Microsoft on this one.
- Quicktime is really slick. As much as they totally lost the video wars, Quicktime is miles ahead of all the other video plugins, Flash included. It’s too bad it requires crappy javascript code and a proprietary plugin. If Apple had opensourced Quicktime a decade ago, Flash would never have made it past being a vector animation program. If the Windows world wouldn’t hate me, I’d just encode everything in Quicktime and say to hell with them. It’s got quality, fast load times, customizability, multiple versions, scalability and a fucking gajillion encoding options.
- FLASH should never have been allowed to do video. Flash is great as a web app development platform and vector animation tool. But it’s an evil bitch from hell for video. I will be so glad when IE puts in HTML5 support. I’d even encode all my videos in OGG format just to get away from having to sell my soul to Adobe to encode a video. Seriously, I am not paying $600 so I can write Flash video files that reference h.264 files. And I’m not paying some other company $100 a year to do it for me.
