karlcow

Opening The Web one bug at a time

Watch YouTube Videos Without Flash

Thursday, November 24, 2011 2:20:34 AM

, ,

In my little experiment about using the Web without a Flash player, as I mentioned earlier, it becomes hard to be able to view YouTube videos. The funny thing is that I noticed that most of the time I can see videos which have been put on blog post. These videos are added through an iframe.

Under each video, there is a feature to be able to share a video. Then a button which says Insert (Insérer in French). A piece of html code (the iframe) appears. You can cut the URI included there, and just paste it into the address bar of your browser… and magic it is working.

So as I said earlier, we can do better. Specifically YouTube (Google) this time.



Update : It could deserve an automatic fallback but there is a way to opt-in into HTML5 video

Experiment: Web Without a Flash PlayerOpenweb Weekly Summary

Comments

Jarek Wilkiewiczwjarek Thursday, November 24, 2011 3:11:24 AM

Hi - I checked with Chrome by subscribing to HTML5 beta (www.youtube.com/html5) and this video works fine with our HTML5 player so something else must be going on. Would you mind starting a thread on our developer forum with your exact config (platform, browser version, etc.?). Here's a link to the forum: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/forum/discussion.html
In case you're interested in how we make the determination whether content is playable with HTML5 player vs Flash, we have a Google I/O presentation about it. You can find it here: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2011/05/youtube-google-io-iframe-player-api.html.
Thanks!
Jarek Wilkiewicz

Karl Dubostkarlcow Thursday, November 24, 2011 3:19:10 AM

Jarek it is working after you opt-in into HTML5. I'm using Opera browser and I do not have a YouTube account.

What I would suggest is

1. Have an automatic fallback when the user doesn't have a flash plug-in.
2. Give a message to inform users they can opt-in to HTML5.

Thanks for the references.

Jarek Wilkiewiczwjarek Thursday, November 24, 2011 5:56:34 AM

Right, our <iframe> player has fallback logic but not the watch page player. I've filed a feature request with the team to implement 1 or 2.
Thanks!
Jarek

Karl Dubostkarlcow Thursday, November 24, 2011 12:26:12 PM

excellent Jarek. Thanks!

Write a comment

New comments have been disabled for this post.