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

More pros for Flash:

• Adobe can add new features and new codecs to video a lot quicker to a mass audience (generally under a year over 90% of users upgrade to the latest version of Flash) compared to browser vendors (there's still a large number of IE6 users out there and that browser came out in 2001).

• Features found in Flash that I imagine will eventually make it to browsers but are not there yet:

  • full screen video (there's a Firefox add-on that supports this but none of the browser do natively yet)
  • video cam, only a small number of websites use this, but there's some really cool stuff happening these days with the video cam and augmented reality in Flash
  • peer-to-peer video, was just added in Flash Player 10 and as the penetration of Flash 10 is getting close to 90%, I think you will see more

As those who say Flash is not indexable, check out what Google has been doing lately with indexing Flash content thanks to a headless player Adobe has supplied. So if you do a google search for FLV files, you can see that Google already indexes Flash video files.

Meanwhile, Adobe Premiere CS4 has speech recognition that will output subtitles for video files in an XML format that can be easily used in Flash video. So expect video for Flash to become a lot more searchable in the future.