Current state of HTML5 video in 2013

Question

I've been using flash video for embedded videos on my site. My old 2.2.x android plays them fine but I'm noticing a lot of new android devices as well as apple devices will not play my videos because flashplayer is fading, so I'm investigating the solution - and HTML5 video seems to be the new thing.

I've just spent 2 hours searching google and read a lot of stuff but most of it is from 1, 2, or 3 years ago -- and judging from what I've read it looks like using the html5 video tag still requires each video to be converted to multiple formats, and full screen is some sort of vendor specific extension -- different on each browser which happens to support it.

So my question is whether HTML5 video tag is a full replacement for the flash player now, or is it still a kludgiferous scheme requiring browser specific hacks for half a dozen most popular browsers -- in 2013?

Does it work on PC's, Macs, Androids, and iPhones?

Answer 1

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

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

For now, you do need to encode in two, possibly 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 HTML video, so for Android and iOS (mainly), all versions, the best you can do is set the video to fill 100% of the browser window. If full-screen is that important, then you'll want to use Flash.

So, in short, yes, HTML5 video does require a little extra work, but at this point, it's not that hard to get right, and it's a standard that's moving in the direction of better stability and uniformity. YouTube, for example, uses it (with fallbacks), if that's any indication that it's ready for prime time.