Archive for the ‘Adobe’ CategoryYouTube HTML5 not even worth of being beta
Google is beta testing HTML5 for video playback on YouTube, and my initial impressions of the technology are not good at all. A few months earlier, I couldn’t get Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Google Chrome to run HTML5 video. I am able to get the latest version of Chrome to render the video, but the results look terrible in its current stage.
Figure 1: YouTube HTML5 beta interface
As you can see in Figure 1, the rendering is horrible compared to Figure 2 in Adobe Flash mode. The image scaling looks like it merely using pixel duplication rather than something decent like cubic interpolation much less something good like Lanczos3. That’s why the image looks extremely blocky and pixilated. There’s no apparent support for 480P, 720P, or 1080P either.
Figure 2: YouTube Flash 10 interface
In Figure 2, we see a mature Flash 10 interface with much nicer quality image rendering as well as higher resolution support. This isn’t to say that there’s fundamentally something wrong with HTML5, just that the current implementation on YouTube has a long way to go before it can replace Flash. This is a major issue for iPhone/iPod/iPad users and Steve Jobs is throwing his whole weight behind HTML5 and has no intention of supporting Adobe Flash.
There’s good reason not to like Flash as it is very buggy and full of security holes that expose its host operating system to nasty malware attacks. Furthermore, the performance of Flash on many laptops and nearly all netbooks is horrible short of having a really fast laptop with rarely deployed dedicated graphics hardware. Microsoft Silverlight (which has been beta tested on iPhone) performs much better on similar hardware than Adobe Flash so there’s a possibility that HTML5 mode might also perform better. But until the implementation becomes much more mature and capable, HTML5 doesn’t even appear to be worthy of being beta.
Last Friday, a new version of Adobe Flash came out which patched the most recent critical flaws in Flash Player. Yet because the update process isn’t automatic, most of you have not updated your Flash Player in your web browser. The fact that Adobe makes the manual update process a pain to use and forces you to install yet another download manager and tries to get you to install yet another browser toolbar doesn’t help. The end result is that most of your computers are vulnerable to websites that display malicious flash content.