HTML 5 <video> tag vs Flash video. What are the pros and cons?

Question

IMPORTANT UPDATE

This question was made over 9 years ago. It made sense then, it doesn\'t make it now. Flash is hard on its way out; sup

Answer 1

For me, it'd be very nice to have the computer built-in or another third party player play the video much more efficient than Flash can do. Not all platforms have Flash: iPhone and Android (for now at least), where the tag may work sooner rather than later. Not talking about Linux either, where Flash works quite badly.

Regarding the Internet being more semantic, it may be important to you. I'm not sure how search engines likes Google and Bing find videos but probably they just know about a bunch of Flash video implementations, so third party small players have no chance. If we are all using the same standard tag, then everybody is on a level playing field.