Current state of HTML5 video in 2013

Question

I use flash videos for embedded videos on my site. My old 2.2.x-android plays them fine, but I notice a lot of new Android devices, and also Apple devices will not play my videos because flashplayer disappears, so I study the solution - and the HTML5 video seems to be a new subject.

I just spent 2 hours searching Google and read a lot of new things, but most of them are from 1, 2 or 3 years ago. And judging by what I read, it looks like using the html5 video tag still requires that each video be converted to several formats, and full-screen mode is a kind of extension for a particular provider - different in each browser, which may support it.

So my question is, is the HTML5 HTML tag a complete replacement for the flash player now, or is it still a kludgiferous scheme requiring specific browsers for half a dozen of the most popular browsers in 2013?

Does it work on PC, Mac, Androids and iPhone?

Answer 1

caniuse.com is a great resource for pretty good data to answer this question.

At the moment ... ~ 92% of web browsers support the HTML video tag . The main one, which is not Opera Mini (about 4.5%). For these users, you can use a Flash backup, which actually doesn't work too much. There are some very simple solutions that will handle this for you, such as videoJS, jPlayer and JWPlayer.

Now you need to encode two, maybe three formats. About 92% of users support MPEG-4 / h.264 . Opera Mini and IE8 do not support it.

Only about 71% of users can support full-screen video , so for Android and iOS (basically) all versions. Best of all, you can set the video to fill 100% of the browser window. If full screen mode is very important, then you will want to use Flash.

So, in short, yes, HTML5 video requires a bit of extra work, but at the moment it is not so difficult, and it is a standard that is moving towards better stability and uniformity. For example, YouTube uses it (with backups) if it indicates that it is ready in prime time.