SublimeVideo offers a sublime video experience
UPDATE: Sublime video now support Firefox.
Video on the web is changing fast. With the arrival of HTML5, many publishers and hosts have acknowledged that the Flash players that have dominated video playback for the last few years are inadequate for the task. Something better is needed. And now, some better things are starting to emerge.
By ‘player’, we mean the code used behind the scenes to tell a web browser to display a particular chunk of video in a particular web page.
Historically, video files were considered too large to post on the web. Few people had the bandwidth to download them. That’s why, when video first began to take off on large web sites, the original video files were re-encoded in Flash, which cut the bandwidth requirements and speeded up downloads. Sure, the video quality suffered a little but for many people, this was an acceptable trade-off.
No more. The bandwidth argument is losing traction because, well, plenty of people have plenty of bandwidth to spare these days. And as more photographers and film-makers turn to the web for distribution and display of their finest of works, the loss of quality in Flash video is no longer a price worth paying. What’s more, Flash is inefficient. It hogs computer resources and sets fans whirring. It’s no longer any good for professionals.
That’s why HTML5 is such a big deal. It’s a new standard for web coding that allows direct embedding of good quality video files, wrapped inside a ‘player’ that does the work of downloading the file and displaying controls to the viewer.
Jilion’s SublimeVideo player still has some way to go, but as you can see in the demo video, what’s there already is very impressive. Try expanding to full browser window view, or jumping forward by clicking anywhere on the progress bar. If you happen to use the WebKit Nightly Build as your browser, you can even get full screen view – with no plugins required for full H.264 display. As Mac writer John Gruber said: “Seriously, this is the real deal.”
Why so? Because as video matures on the web, so the player software we all depend on to play it. At least, that’s the theory. By dominating video playback in recent years, the big sites like YouTube have encouraged dependency on Flash that’s held everyone back. The distribution system and the audience have moved on; the development of player software has got stalled.
The move towards HTML5 is a significant one for everyone who makes video and intends to display it online. Jilion’s effort to push forward with an HTML5 player that doesn’t just perform well, but looks fantastic too, is a very welcome step in the right direction.
