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The Future of Web Video, Part 2

Mar 2, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

HTML5? Someday. Ogg? Probably not.

Welcome back. In our last edition, I detailed what HTML5 is and why it's important and set the stage for my analysis of Ogg Theora, which was supposed to be the focus of this second part. But a funny thing happened on the way to the second part of this story. Specifically, I read the penultimate paragraph of my previous piece, where I wondered aloud how efficient Flash 10.1 will be and how playback in YouTube will compare between the new HTML5 versions and the Flash version.

HTML5 vs. Flash

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The Future of Web Video, Part 1 I admit that the nexus is a bit tenuous, but if you're an Apple Final Cut Pro producer, you're undoubtedly producing for the Web. Over the past few months, you've been hearing that Flash is going away, H.264 is going away, and soon you'll have to produce all your video in an open-source video codec... A Coming War Over Web Video? You could hear the jeers the instant Apple introduced its iPad last week. It was a common refrain: "No Flash support? What's the point?"... Distribute Expertise: Flash vs. Silverlight Since its introduction at NAB Show 2007, Microsoft Silverlight has achieved a number of high-profile design wins including mlb.com, nba.com, and NBC's...

So, I spent some time playing and comparing, with some interesting results. I'll summarize here, and you can read my analysis, titled "Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends," for the complete picture.

• First, on Windows, Flash Player 10.1 was a home run, dropping the CPU required to play back the Flash-based video by up to 73 percent. That's because Flash Player 10.1 can access the graphics processing unit for hardware acceleration during playback in a window (acceleration was only available for full-screen playback in previous versions of Flash).
• On the Mac, in Safari, the HTML5 YouTube player was about 66 percent more efficient than Flash-based version. However, as I mention in the article, Adobe can't access hardware playback on the Mac, while Apple can in Safari, which leads to the performance discrepancy.
• In addition, Safari, playing the Flash version, was significantly more efficient than Google's Chrome playing the HTML5 version.

As I comment in the article, "It seems reasonable to assume that if the Flash Player could access GPU-based hardware acceleration on the Mac (or iPod/iPhone/iPad), the difference between the CPU required for HTML5 playback and Flash playback would be very much narrowed, if not eliminated."

The article concludes, "Overall, it's inaccurate to conclude that Flash is inherently inefficient. Rather, Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't. ... At least from a CPU-utilization perspective, Flash isn't bad and HTML5 isn't good. It all depends upon the platform and implementation."

One major objection to Flash has been the CPU load, and historically, it's been very high. With 10.1, however, Adobe finally found the magic bullet—hardware acceleration—that reduces the load considerably. How this will impact the clamor for HTML5 is anyone's guess, but it's certainly a strong point in Flash's favor.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

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