When Google began soliciting feedback from users about what features they would most like to see in the next version of YouTube, the response was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic request for standards-based open video: users called for Google to support the HTML5 video element.

Google responded by rolling out an experimental HTML5-based player on YouTube that allows users to watch videos without having to depend on Adobe's Flash plugin. Vimeo, another leading video hosting website, followed suit this afternoon and rolled out an HTML5 beta test of its own. Of course, both of them are lagging behind DailyMotion, which launched its HTML5 beta last year.

The giants of the Web video are clearly responding to growing pressure from tech-savvy users to ditch Flash and adopt standards-based solutions that mesh better with the open Web. The HTML5 video element integrates seamlessly with conventional HTML content and can be manipulated with JavaScript and CSS, making it possible for Web developers to make their video player user interfaces match the look and feel of their websites.

In a blog post written today, Vimeo identified some of the key advantages of its new HTML5-based player. The player loads faster, offers smoother playback, and allows users to jump to various points in the stream without having to wait for buffering. In addition to fundamentally improving the user experience, HTML5 video will also enable content to reach platforms like the iPhone that aren't officially supported by Adobe.

Google first expressed public interest in adopting the HTML5 video element for YouTube last year when it presented an early mockup of a standards-based Web video player at the Google I/O conference.

As we explained at the time, Google and other Web content delivery companies have a lot to gain from standards-based video. It will enable them to reduce their exposure to lock-in and avoid proprietary video client technologies that are controlled by single vendors. Thanks to the standards process, the future of native Web video can be guided through an inclusive process in which stakeholders are allowed to participate.

It's also a win for users who will finally have the ability to choose between multiple interoperable client implementations. Although Adobe has taken some promising steps to open key parts of the Flash specification and has released the source code of some of the underlying components of the Flash player, independent developers contend that those moves have not been sufficient to enable the creation of a fully-functional third-party open source player.

Flash is often criticized by users who are frustrated with its poor performance and stability, high resource consumption, frequent security vulnerabilities, lack of conduciveness to accessibility, poor browser integration, and a multitude of other problems. The quality of the plug-in is even worse on Mac OS X and Linux, reflecting Adobe's lack of commitment to delivering a consistent user experience across platforms. Adobe is seemingly oblivious to these problems and often responds dismissively when engaging with the public. It's likely that frustration with Flash's flaws is one factor that is driving users to advocate standards-based solutions.

Challenges for standards-based video

Although HTML5 video has a whole lot of advantages, there are still some major challenges that need to be addressed before it can gain widespread adoption. One of the most significant challenges is that Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser has poor support for emerging standards and does not yet have an HTML5 video implementation.

Fortunately, even Microsoft is beginning to recognize the inevitability of standards-based video. Microsoft began collaborating with the HTML5 working group last year and publicly endorsed the HTML5 video element. It's still not clear if Microsoft plans to add the feature to its browser in the near future, but it is starting to look very likely that the company will eventually do so.

Another problem that is impeding ubiquitous adoption of HTML5 video is an ongoing dispute about what multimedia codecs should be used on the Internet. Google and Apple favor h.264 while Opera and Mozilla prefer Ogg Theora. Although Theora doesn't yet rival h.264 in performance and compression quality, its advantage is that it is thought to be unencumbered by software patents—meaning that it can be used royalty-free and distributed in open source software applications.

As we explained in our detailed examination of the codec debate last year, the future of h.264 licensing costs is somewhat ambiguous, making it a risky choice for the Web. There are also unanswered questions about Ogg's patent status, however, and some browser vendors are concerned about the risk of submarine patents. Another problem is the limited out-of-the-box support for hardware-accelerated Ogg playback in the mobile and embedded space.

This debate isn't any closer to a resolution today. Vimeo and YouTube are both using h.264, which means that their new HTML5 video players don't work at all in Firefox.

A seemingly obvious solution is for Firefox and other browsers that can't distribute patented codecs to simply expose platform-level video playback engines in the browser so that the HTML5 video player can leverage the codecs already installed on the user's system. Mozilla has resisted this solution for ideological reasons: the organization doesn't want to encourage adoption of codecs that can't be used royalty-free, because they fear that doing so would put open source implementations at a disadvantage and potentially disenfranchise content creators who can't afford the patent licensing costs.

Conclusion

Although there are still a number of important problems to solve before open video can displace Flash-based video playback on the Web, it seems likely that we will see more progress now that the major players are all on board and the users are enthusiastically calling for better standards support.