How are you including videos on your website? Are you still using flash to embed them or have you switched to html5?
With the state of the internet today it makes sense to use the video playback features already included in modern web browsers and revert to flash playback only when necessary. This is true for several reasons.
First, people watching flash videos must have a flash plugin installed to watch videos, but html5 does not require users to install any browser plugins to watch videos. Removing additional requirements of video playback not only streamlines the process, it also lessens the workload on your CPU.
Secondly, and probably the most important, millions of mobile devices are blocked from using flash in any form. This means that anyone using a device such as the iPad will never see a video if it is in flash format. But html5 videos are viewable without a hitch on these devices. Mobile internet devices are one of the fastest growing industries, so content providers are going to need to adapt to this arena as well as the normal desktop territory.
While html5 video has its advantages, there are still weaknesses to this new way of doing things.
The main drawback to using html5 video is the lack of a viable fullscreen option. Watching an online flash video in fullscreen is nothing out of the ordinary, but not an option yet in html5. Well, you can watch html5 video in fullscreen with the latest version of Firefox, but the framerate is remarkably reduced which results in a very “choppy” video.
So if you can handle the lack of fullscreen playback, then there really is no reason to use flash for videos except as a fallback method for browsers that don’t yet support html5 video.
If you don’t use html5 video on your site, what is holding you back?
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