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Yahoo! Media

Moving Beyond Flash: the Yahoo HTML5 Video Player (streamingmedia.com) 96

Posted by EditorDavid from the gone-like-a-Flash dept.
Slashdot reader theweatherelectric writes: Over on Streaming Media, Amit Jain from Yahoo has written a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Yahoo's HTML5 video player. He writes, "Adobe Flash, once the de-facto standard for media playback on the web, has lost favor in the industry due to increasing concerns over security and performance. At the same time, requiring a plugin for video playback in browsers is losing favor among users as well. As a result, the industry is moving toward HTML5 for video playback...

At Yahoo, our video player uses HTML5 across all modern browsers for video playback. In this post we will describe our journey to providing an industry-leading playback experience using HTML5, lay out some of the challenges we faced, and discuss opportunities we see going forward."
Yet another brick in the wall? YouTube and Twitch have already switched to HTML5, and last year Google started automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5.
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Moving Beyond Flash: the Yahoo HTML5 Video Player More

Moving Beyond Flash: the Yahoo HTML5 Video Player

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  • Taking a page from Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Sunday September 25, 2016 @05:48PM (#52959175)
    Coming very late to the party, and probably with nothing but a run-of-the-mill offering. Is Yahoo still relevant?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sure, Yahoo! is still relevant...just look at how many users lost their personal information in the last two years. (half a billion)

      That said, I'm sure glad we have a privacy protector like Yahoo! to help secure our computers!

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Berkyjay ( 1225604 )

      I bet you it's huge in middle America who have had their emails since the late 90's and still post on Yahoo Answers.

      • I bet you it's huge in middle America who have had their emails since the late 90's and still post on Yahoo Answers.

        I am a yahoo.com user, and I have been doing so for ages, certainly before Gmail. I left hotmail for yahoo years ago.
        Any internet site today is not guaranteed to be protected from hackers. The Democratic party, and I bet the government and military servers have long ago been hacked.
        Yes, they got names, addresses, etc, but only encrypted passwords. And if gmail was hacked, I guarantee that you would not hear ever that it occurred.

        I like the yahoo.com interface. I feel more comfortable with it than with gma

    • Re:Taking a page from Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)

      by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Sunday September 25, 2016 @09:15PM (#52959917)
      They are trying to leverage all the publicity they are getting from the password hack by showing everyone that they are still capable of keeping up with the state of web development in 2011.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Karlt1 ( 231423 )

      According to Alexa, Yahoo ranks #5 globally. Wikipedia is #6. So Yahoo is still relevant.

  • lolwut? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Desler ( 1608317 ) on Sunday September 25, 2016 @05:54PM (#52959209)

    What challenges? Was typing:

    <video controls><source src=""></video>

    really that hard?

    • Especially since most, though not all, of the flash-using sites have been using a flash player to display an .flv or .mp4 served over HTTP anyway, since flash's DRM was mostly too pitiful to bother with and HTTP is more likely than RTMP or similar to Just Work with the various bits and pieces of your web infrastructure.

      There might be some nontrivial changes(though mostly from more exotic to less exotic, so not hugely interesting) if you were going from RTMP or a similar streaming oriented format to servi

    • Re:lolwut? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spongman ( 182339 ) on Monday September 26, 2016 @01:05AM (#52960545)

      > Was typing ... really that hard?

      yeah, that's fine if you want your video to work only sometimes, on some devices. and if you don't need pre-rolls, or interstitials, or playlists, or analytics, or you don't care about handling full-screen correctly, or adaptive bitrate.

      pop quiz: which versions of firefox support h.264? which protocol suports bitrate streaming on google chrome on windows? on iPad?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Desler ( 1608317 )

        and if you don't need pre-rolls, or interstitials, or playlists, or analytics,

        You're correct. I don't need any of that. All off that is just bullshit added in to annoy the person trying to watch a video.

        • right, but you know who might need that?

          one of the largest ad networks on the planet? or maybe the 4th most popular video web site, with approximate 125M monthly visitors?

          besides. the claim that you don't need a feature doesn't mean that your solution is significant. you didn't address any of the other things that you "solution" completely fails to address.

          you're just digging yourself deeper into the hole here. your first post showed you clearly don't know what the fuck you're talking about. and you're not

    • Was the embed tag really that hard? I'd really prefer the browser defer to plugins that I could choose to NOT INSTALL at all, or defer to the OS.
      Bloating up the browser is dumb. It's all the bad of plugins, loaded all the time, without the option to rip them out. How many security updates does Chrome or Firefox or IE have every year?

    • Re:lolwut? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 ) on Monday September 26, 2016 @09:14AM (#52961891)

      What challenges? Was typing:

      <video controls><source src=""></video>

      really that hard?

      Unfortunately that's too simple for many sites. They want to wrap "added value" around the video.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quetwo ( 1203948 )

      Sure. But the hard things are :
      - Ads, and tracking their placement, etc.
      - Encrypted Content (most content producers don't want their content streamed unencrypted -- and that causes issues for vanilla browser deployments)
      - Streaming (this becomes less trivial if you are looking to utilize existing infrastructure to stream to the browser).

      And these are why HTML5 video is still slow to roll out. Once the HTML5 spec had a basic video player, everybody moved onto the next shiny object a

  • 1 question (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How do I watch South Park without flash player?

  • -Still- looking at you, BBC... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday September 25, 2016 @05:57PM (#52959223) Homepage
    BBC still requires Flash on my desktop Safari. Switch the user-agent to being an iPad and presto - nice, working HTML 5 video without a single layout change either. Have sent in 'feedback' time after time after time.

    Honestly, get with the times and dump Flash. Or at least service HTML 5 for preference and only fall back to Flash. Not this "let's serve Flash to HTML 5-capable browsers" rubbish.

    • It would be nice if VMWare were to dump using flash as well. That's the major reason I still have it at work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      ABC iView here in Australia also still requires Flash :(

    • Or dump Safari the IE 6 of this decade?

      It lacks many HTML 5 features and mac users never upgrade and still use 2009 snow leopard with Safari 4 which makes IE look cutting edge in comparison. I saw a statistic a year or two ago showing 1/3 of Mac users had ancient versions of Mac OSx.

      Use Chrome

  • The big players moved to HTML5 ages ago. Yahoo is the latest example of a no-longer meaningful Internet property being auctioned off to whomever will buy it (Verizon Wireless). Its relevance passed years ago and what it does or does not do -- long after the industry has already moved there -- is not of any relevance.

    I'm happy someone listens to their PR and submits slashdot stories about it. It would otherwise be a boring day without humorous articles.

    E

    • > The big players moved to HTML5 ages ago.

      define "ages ago".

      firefox only started supporting html5 netflix in 12/2015.

  • The timing of this announcement tells me they are trying to distract us from something [slashdot.org].

  • Or is it the implementation of the protocol?

    I've written parsers for both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and while I never actually looked I never saw any security problems with either. I'm guessing Flash is the same way. The protocol is fine, the implementation is problematic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      It can depend on the funding. National broadcasters have region locked sites with set DRM that is contract friendly with content owners and producers.
      Some sites like the hardware support for mic, cam.
  • I'd love to ditch flash and use the HTML 5 player on YouTube, however they are using a whitelist to decide who can see HD content on YouTube with the HTML 5 player, and in their infinite hubris, Pale Moon is not on their whitelist. When will this user-agent sniffing/whitelist bullshit ever end?!
    • My problem with HTML5 is you can't jump around in the video reliably. Lets say it's a 5 minute vid, you're 2 minutes in and "whoa, what was that?", try to go back 10 seconds and you get the loading screen. Or you're 2 minutes in, bored, jump ahead a minute, and get the loading screen. Or 2 minutes in, someone knocks on your door, you pause, open it a few minutes later and get the loading screen.

      doesn't help HTML5 seems to load at the speed of play. Forget about watching the first minute, getting bore

    • Yeah, I run Chromium without Flash and I can't play most YouTube video. I checked their HTML5 page and I've got everything but h.264 support and nuthin'. Not even Google likes Google's codecs.

  • Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Sunday September 25, 2016 @08:08PM (#52959689) Homepage

    Oddly enough, Facebook has reverted from HTML5 back to Flash for their desktop site. This is highly odd, considering they support video on non-flash-enabled mobile devices. This is extremely frustrating trying to see videos from friends and then be notified I cannot, due to lack of flash, although it worked a month or two ago.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's likely because they added live video. The way the handle live broadcasts likely doesn't work well with current HTML5 tech.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by markus ( 2264 )

        I would vote you up if I could. There are in fact real technical problems with showing life content in HTML5 videos. And while there are a couple of proposals on how to address this issue, there is so far no consensus among browser makers. I expect things to get better quickly, as all major browsers are rapidly moving away from Flash. But for a small numbers of specific use cases, HTML5 does not quite have an adequate answer.

        The bad news is that this will be painful for the smallish number of affected web d

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          There are in fact real technical problems with showing life content in HTML5 videos.

          Live video works fine in HTML5 on YouTube. Live video also works fine in WebRTC. So what precisely are these alleged "real technical problems"?

    • this is because Facebook is an ad network - you & your friends are the product. Facebook sells your eyes to their customers, and if their customers want to show you flash pre-rolls and interstitials, then that's exactly what Facebook will use. Money talks.

  • "..has lost favor in the industry due to increasing concerns over security..."

    • Yahoo is the Internet equivalent of a store that was completely looted. There are only broken packages on the floor. The store manager orders a new video camera to prove he's sincere about security. Yahoo has already been cleaned out. Anything they do for now that is useful, will improve their image.

  • This isn't a huge deal (Score:3)

    by Jack9 ( 11421 ) on Sunday September 25, 2016 @09:21PM (#52959939)

    > In this post we will describe our journey to providing an industry-leading playback experience using HTML5

    In other words, a regular html5 player with ads enabled. Their mystery recommendation engine is the hardest part (depending on how complicated they make the VAST/VPAID).

  • ... will stream with from their website.

    I would love to be rid of flash forever, but there remains a small but distinct subset of websites for which I do not have any legal alternative for the content they provide that insist upon sticking with it... until hell freezes over as far as I can tell.

  • Main thing its missing is a working video blocker so that videos will start playing when I want them to, not as soon as a tab is loaded. Right now I have like 3 or 4 different extensions loaded purely to try and prevent autoplaying videos and it still doesn't get them all. So annoying.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakarra ( 112805 )

      +1 to the "why can't I stop videos from autoplaying" problem. Those extensions force frequent browser upgrades too, as apparently the latest "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" extension usually requires the very latest Chrome. It's an immature field that is still under rapid development. And dammit, I'm sometimes working on a slow link, or have limited data. I don't want that link clogged trying to download a video I have no intention of playing. I don't want a "no autoplay" half-measure -- I don't want my browser to

  • Why don't just provide a link to the video and let *me* use the video player of my choice? Why force-feed the users some "experience", conceived in the darkest corners of a sick web designer's phantasy?

    I, for one am glad for cclive and youutube-dl. Other than youtube, if I can find a link to the video hidden somewhere in a crappy javascript mess whithin the page source, I download it. If not -- I just don't see the video.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakarra ( 112805 )

      Why don't just provide a link to the video and let *me* use the video player of my choice?

      1) Flash was everywhere. It was reliably installed, and every flash doohickey in a web site would include a link to install flash if your computer didn't already have it. Video would never caught on if it had to be up to the end user. Half the web users don't want to go to some random video player site to install it, especially if they're just on a library computer, or they want to send a video link to grandma, etc.
      2) Sorry, as much as you want your own presentation, none of the web sites that serve content

  • That's at least one thing Yahoo has over so many news websites, entertainment networks portals, and CRUNCHYROLL I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

  • I only kept Flash for accessing absolute basic-needs sites. The moment xvideos switched to html5, I de-installed Flash and never looked back.

  • ...and last year Google started automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5.

    Spiffy. Now Google needs to build a plug-in that works with NWS radar loops as they still require Flash.

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