Google has created an opt-in beta program for anyone wanting to test YouTube with the HTML5 tag rather than using Flash. There are a few caveats however, with the number one being that it’s still all H.264 video. No Theora to speak of, yet, but it’s possibly a step in the right direction!
3 thoughts on “YouTube HTML5 beta program launched, but without Theora support”
The main one for me being that it doesn’t work at all.
I have the
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfreepackage installed (containing H.264, which I confirm to work with a local-only H.264 video in the<video>tag), and all I get is this lousy error:Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.
Funny thing is that I don’t see a single
<video>tag in the whole markup. Smells fishy to me.Mmm.. interesting. I don’t have support for H.264, so I haven’t tested it at all. I think however, that it does not use system codecs at all, but playback is built into the browser itself, hence why it doesn’t work. I’m guessing that Chromium had to take out H.264 support because of patent licensing for streaming. Chrome might work.
Here’s the blog entry:
“http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/introducing-youtube-html5-supported.html”
-c