Ask HN: Were playing web videos without Adobe Flash possible before HTML5?

[WonderAlmighty]

I was quite surprised to find out that the `<video>` element wasn't supported until HTML5, which didn't reach W3C recommended status until 10/2014. I did a bunch of searches for this, including before 2013, 2011 and 2008. The later showed no results. I found the `<object>` element which can play videos, but that seems to depend on browser support for the video formats (containers + codecs), did browsers have native video playback before HTML5?

[genezeta]

No, browsers did not have native support for video before the <video> tag.

Late 90s:

Netscape and IE, the main browsers at that time had generic plugin support through <object> and <embed>. What this did was load a plugin if it was indeed installed in your browser.

There were various video plugins available at various moments, e.g. Quicktime (.mov), LiveVideo (.avi), some Java and ActiveX... From the IE3.0 beta press release here [0] (1996) you can see mentioned some of the support for those things.

Again, you had to have the plugin which may not have been available for specific browsers or OSs. An additional problem is you needed to have an appropriate codec.

Early 00s:

Around ~2002 Flash started supporting video with FLV files. This still meant requiring the flash plugin but by that time it was fairly common. When YouTube started in 2005 it played through Flash.

HTML5:

HTML5 was released publicly ~2008 but didn't become a W3C recommendation until ~2014. Discussion on <video> started ~2006-7 but actual support still needed a few years more.

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/1996/05/29/microsoft-internet-exp... (search for "video")

[solardev]

RealPlayer deserves a mention here. Way way way before Flash and others, back in 95, they made streaming video possible over dialup modem (at like 320x240 or lower, 4 or 5 fps or so). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer

Today it's just some spamware reusing that old trademark, but it was the first popular streaming video implementation on the web.

Before that we mostly had server rendered video frames on a meta refresh timer, like Netscape Fishcam (https://www.fishcam.com/). Netscape was the commercial predecessor to Mozilla, the browser/company that eventually made Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

And before that you kinda sorta had ASCII graphics, sometimes with color, sent over direct modem connections to your local BBS. (And Gopher was in there somewhere in between)

I feel old.

[thesuperbigfrog]

>> And before that you kinda sorta had ASCII graphics, sometimes with color, sent over direct modem connections to your local BBS.

Brings back fond memories playing Trade Wars 2002 on a favorite BBS.

[WheelsAtLarge]

Yes, there were plugins for different video formats. A popular one was QuickTime. There were others but QuickTime was popular.

[brudgers]

I saw Mosaic playing a weather animation in 1994.

It was over a hotrodded connection at 16600 baud.

I thought, "this will never work" while the download took several minutes.

---

The night I spent watching videos of Tsunami footage in 2004, was the first time web video felt usable...that was through a cable modem.

---

HTML5 was web standards catching up with reality. But that's always been the case with HTML standards because businesses develop technology to do what needs doing and eventually, it makes sense for everyone to do it the same way.

[fuzzfactor]

2014 was not bad because it was not an essential priority of any kind.

Way before Flash, most people had Windows and HTML comes with hyperlinks.

These go way back.

Decades ago, the Windows Media Video (.wmv) file extension was "associated" by default with Windows Media Player (WMP), the built-in Microsoft media player.

So you double-click on a WMV file, then it automatically opens WMP and plays your media according to the settings you have in WMP.

You could also associate other types of media files with WMP, so those type files would also launch the player. But WMP would only play the formats for which you have installed the proper codecs. WMV format file support was just naturally included for everybody with Windows.

OTOH you could install an additional media player like VLC and associate different file extensions with either player as you would like. So you weren't actually stuck with WMV that bad, if you had the codecs. And VLC had a lot of different codecs included, still does.

And still today, with something like Legacy WMP, new Microsoft MP, or VLC set to open when you double-click on one of your MP4 files for instance, there is naturally no browser needed. But if a link on a web page is single-clicked when it points to a similar MP4 which is posted on the internet, it will work too. Won't play in the browser of course without embedding and stuff, it'll just play the normal way, popping up in its separate media player window. Alternatively, you could just right-click and download the MP4 and play it later, this was common for those who did not have the bandwidth to smoothly play it as it streamed in, like on dial-up.

Flash arose as a low-performance alternative, intentionally compromising the animation or motion picture to use less bandwidth without being too ugly when played at the same rate the data comes in over dial-up.

With the <video> tag a media file will still only play if the correct codec is handling it as the data makes its way to your monitor & speakers. Different browsers and OS's will not behave identically, somewhat analogous to the regular old way, where end users had a variety of players and codecs all over the ball park which would not all do the exact same thing in response to a particular media hyperlink.

[eterm]

In general, it was awkward to rely on plugins for video support, so flash was indeed generally used.

Here's a 2015 article referencing YouTube dropping flash for it's HTML5 player: https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-fla...

The article touches on the challenge of getting to that point.

[beardyw]

I remember pulling some YouTube video from the browser's cache, it being there as a complete file and just needing to be renamed. I suspect that was Flash though.