YouTube demotes Flash to stream HTML5 video by default

[HEXUS]

Online video company's move to provide better video support on more devices.

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[plexabit]

I thought that there was a video and that the flash player actually crashed and I was thinking about how ironic that was...

[OilSheikh]

Why is everyone so against Flash ? Flash players revolutionised the web!

[jim]

Why is everyone so against Flash ? Flash players revolutionised the web!

If we kept using everything that was revolutionary we'd start to look pretty backwards.

[shaithis]

The sooner flash dies a horrible death, the better.

Chrome has solved the majority of my issues with it but that is a band-aid and if google go off in some awful direction with chrome I would be left trying to pick between the lesser of 2 evils.

Youtube is only 1 site unfortunately, the amount of pages with flash (especially horribly implemented ads) is still WAY too high.

I do applaud YouTube though.

[GuidoLS]

Why is everyone so against Flash ? Flash players revolutionised the web!

Beyond being fairly buggy (still) after 15plus iterations, it's also a serious vector for hackers, who manage to find exploits in every single release, including repairs of the old hack vectors.

There have also been issues with memory leaks, but those are sort of secondary.

[nicktids]

if only the whole web would jump forward without flash but its still needed so much as the millions of legacy websites that won't move away from it.

[The_Brown_Light]

It was crashing a lot recently in the past year.
If the update gives better stability then all good I say.
There can be other applications for Flash.

[watercooled]

The (rather significant) downside of this is that Youtube now uses a fairly CPU-intensive VP9 codec rather than hardware-accelerated h264, so say goodbye to a significant amount of battery life on laptops. And to smooth playback if you don't have a particularly new CPU or something like an Atom.

Last time I checked, the HTML5 implementation of h264 decoding was already less efficient than Flash, and Chrome's pepperflash less efficient than the plugin version.

Add to that Google are saying they'll be regularly releasing new codecs and it doesn't look good for efficient hardware implementations going forward either; obviously they take time to roll out and need a significant amount of transistors.

HTML can do a lot of the stuff (good and bad) than flash can; it's by no means a magical fix-all replacement. And don't mistake this HTML5 push as charitable, at best it's to save Google's bandwidth, at the expense of many consumers' experience.

The frustrating thing is, there was still a good amount of headroom in the x264 codec as they were using a very fast compression setting (and hence worse quality/compression ratio), however it seems they're now using a VP9 encoder with settings cranked up which is orders of magnitude more CPU-intensive, probably as a marketing ploy to make their shiny new codec look better than it really is...

And Google are a fine one to talk if they're talking about stability. Flash hasn't crashed on me in a long time. Chrome OTOH does it semi-frequently, and their supposed crash-prevention by separating tabs into their own process is about as useful as a chocolate teapot as I don't think I've seen one crash which took down only a single tab - it always takes the whole browser.

[shaithis]

In the last year, the only time I have had Chrome crash was when its cache and appdata were in a roaming or redirected profile.

[watercooled]

Just done a quick real-world test on one of those Linx tablets, loaded a video in 1080p in Firefox with Flash which despite being greater than screen resolution, plays completely fine.

Tried the same thing in Chrome which OFC now defaults to the HTML5 player, which as expected results in a juddery, unwatchable mess. Same even for 720p. Well done Google.

How does the saying go? If it's not broken ... fix it until is is. :sigh:

Newer - bettuh! Or something like that.

Try it yourselves. If your system is fast enough to bruteforce through the decoding (most recent desktops will be), just take a look at CPU load when comparing the two.

Edit: Oh and if you do notice it, you can right click on video > report playback problem.

[Darth Sidious]

death to flash