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

I've been reading around this recently for a site I'm building now. I've gone with Flash video for now, because the launch is pretty soon. Also, we're on a shared hosting environment, so all video conversion has to be done before the video is uploaded. I don't want to ask the client to upload two versions of each video.

But, ultimately, I do want to switch to open video. It looks pretty cool. I've seen a demo which uses javascript to overlay subtitles on a video, degrading gracefully in the absence of javascript to a text transcript below the video. (I think that was on A List Apart.) And Mozilla have some fun demos up. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/google-dailymotion-endorse-html-5-and-standards-based-video.ars