Flash/HTML5 video question

[d000hg]

I'm a bit confused, I thought both flash and HTML5 supported H264 - so why can't the same video file be used for both types of player? At least I don't think they can... FLV is my default video type for online.

Can anyone unravel the codec, file-type, spaghetti, for me?

[Incognito]

HTML5 is the language, the ability to play H.264 encoded video relies on the platform, I.e IE9.

Good link.

H.264 Is A Codec, Flash Is A Platform: One Can't Kill Off The Other | Dan Rayburn - StreamingMediaBlog.com

[NickFitz]

Start here: Video - Dive Into HTML5

If you're planning to put video online yourself, it's easiest to just use vid.ly.

[d000hg]

HTML5 is the language, the ability to play H.264 encoded video relies on the platform, I.e IE9.

That's kind of how I understood it, which makes me wonder why you can't [?] play FLV on an iPhone through HTML5 - the FLV is on the server side after all and Apple like MS prefer H264.

I think Nick's link addresses this but it still seems daft

[d000hg]

On a related note - since I don't have an iOS device is there an easy way to check if I set up an iOS-compatible video? Right now I'm happy to have Flash as the default and fall-back to HTML5 with a single lower-res version (using JWPlayer) but I don't trust it until I can test it.

[VectraMan]

That's kind of how I understood it, which makes me wonder why you can't [?] play FLV on an iPhone through HTML5 - the FLV is on the server side after all and Apple like MS prefer H264.

I think Nick's link addresses this but it still seems daft

Apple are hardly likely to support Adobe's format now are they?

IIRC both will play .MP4 files. Of course it still won't work in every HTML5 compatible browser (at least not without the Flash plugin).

[d000hg]

Apple are hardly likely to support Adobe's format now are they?

But the file goes on the server, that's the part which confuses me - how the client matters so much.

[NickFitz]

That's kind of how I understood it, which makes me wonder why you can't [?] play FLV on an iPhone through HTML5 - the FLV is on the server side after all and Apple like MS prefer H264.

H.264 is just the video codec; the "video file" is a container that also includes things like the audio track, and maybe subtitles and so on. FLV is Adobe's (previously Macromedia's) proprietary file format, whereas the iThings support the MP4 container.

It's a bit like word processor documents: Microsoft Word's .doc format is a container, as is WordPerfect's .wpd format. Both can wrap text encoded in (for example) ISO-8859-1, but each one has its own way of wrapping it; although your device is perfectly capable of displaying ISO-8859-1 encoded characters, it needs to know how to get them out of the container first.

In other words, video is at roughly the same point text was in 1990, when you couldn't exchange documents with somebody unless they used the same program (and probably the same version of the program) as you.

Aside: I notice on the Wikipedia page for MS Word that "Microsoft does not guarantee the correct display of the document on different workstations, even if the two workstations use the same version of Microsoft Word, primarily due to page layout depending on the current printer."