Tuesday 2 March 2010

HTML5 Youtube — Now in Fedora

I'm finally back to rawhide (the frozen one — i.e. Fedora 13; dual booting with F12 as it is still not over too stable :D). And since I follow webkit commits I noticed a while back that thanks to some of the work in the webkitgtk tree, html5 youtube should work [in theory]. So today I started epiphany, enabled html5 youtube and tried a video. A lo! it works:

Finally! Youtube without flash, with low CPU usage and actually working. Oh and as a sidenote: pages (like anidb) which send themselves encoded are now supported as well. Webkitgtk based browsers are becoming first class citizens finally. Java is the last non-working thing I'm aware of and work on it is also on it's way. Seems like I'll be able to get rid of firefox (which I still keep because of the problems with java) for good (or bad :D) in F13.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds great!

Does that mean that WebKit supports H.264 video?

Martin said...

Anonymous: Yeah, from a certain point of view you could say that. In long story — webkitgtk implements the video and audio tags via gstreamer, which means whatever codec you have installed in gstreamer is working in epiphany, midori, etc. as well. The qt version AFAIK implements these tag via phonon, so as long as h264 is supported in phonon, you'll have it supported in webkit-qt too ;-)

none said...

is it firefox?

Martin said...

axet, nope. Firefox does not support any other codecs than those bundled with it (AFAIK ogg/ogv containers, theora video and vorbis audio, maybe flac audio as well) and due to patent issues it cannot ship h264. Blame the people over at firefox for putting FLOSS promoting above functionality and good software design ;-) But I believe that when html5 youtube is more tested it will provide videos in ogg/theora/vorbis as well (unless they use this opportunity to promote chrome over firefox...)