Because (a) I don’t post much video (b) the overwhelming majority of DF’s audience is in fact using an HTML5-compatible version of Safari, Firefox, or Chrome 2 and (c) I’m willing to be a dick about this I do not care about fallbacks for browsers that don’t support. Therefore few sites are using HTML5 video in production now, and of those, nearly all are doing so with fallback markup, often of significant complexity, that presents the video using a Flash player for other browsers. This isn’t one of those things that just doesn’t work in IE6 or IE7 - it doesn’t work in IE period. The obvious downside to relying solely on the element to embed web video is that because it’s new, the only browsers that support it are recent releases of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome.

(Likewise for audio with the new element.) In a nut, it attempts to make embedding a video in a web page just as easy markup-wise as embedding an image with the tag. So I’ve been paying attention to the new element in HTML5. Worse, it now has a new significant problem: it doesn’t work at all in Chrome (at least on the Mac). That markup met all of my aforementioned desires but for one: the tag is not standard. What you see upon page load is a poster frame (a still image), then you (the user) click the poster frame to actually download and watch the video. Here’s an example from a year ago, using QuickTime. I seldom post video to DF, but when I do, I refuse to embed Flash, 1 I want the markup to be sane and standard, I want the video to play in popular standards-compliant web browsers, and I don’t want the video to download/buffer automatically. Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in Browsers Which Support It Monday, 21 December 2009

Download html5 video safari