Google’s I/O conference has been going on full steam with lots of new announcements and products from the Google camp. One particular piece of news that struck me with great interest was that Google have released a YouTube demo site which implements the new HTML5 <video> tag. This means native browser playback of video files rather than using the Flash plug-in that the main YouTube site does presently.
Support for this tag is not available in all browsers, but it’s getting there with each new browser release. In theory, native video playback results in better CPU performance versus the use of a plug-in, which is a nice addition to the usual standards argument.
Check the demo site out for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/html5
You’ll need a fairly modern browser: Safari 3.1+, Opera 9.52+ or Firefox 3.5+ to view the site correctly. Sorry, IE fans – write to Microsoft about it! Google Chrome users may have to wait until version 3 for support!