[Aissen]

So Apple dug a hole by:

- not allowing iOS to play videos in-DOM.

- deciding not to support WebM, so Firefox users can't see their videos.

And now others are following them by helping to dig deeper in a vastly inefficient way of displaying moving images ? What could previously be offloaded to dedicated engines is now going to burn the CPU via JS. Hum, now that's gonna work…

[lloeki]

> a vastly inefficient way of displaying moving images ?

I don't see this as a MP4/WebM replacement (compared to which it is effectively inefficient) but a GIF replacement (plus it's scriptable and hackable in a number of interesting ways). I wish it were a real, self-contained file format, but APNG completely failed to displace GIF.

It's a hack, but it solves a real problem and it opens a venue for something less hackish.

Also, it's simple enough any developer can understand the algorithm, there's no patent looming over, no complex codec infrastructure (however layered away), and it's using only HTML/CSS/JS.

[jackalope]

I viewed three examples simultaneously from the Phosphor gallery at http://www.divergentmedia.com/phosphor/gallery and each one only used about 5% CPU, for 15% total. I closed them and viewed a YouTube HTML5 video (no Flash on this machine) and it consistently used 70% CPU. It seems the Phosphor approach is more lightweight than video and it was entirely smooth (on a 2007 dual core MacBook Pro running a 64-bit Linux). If you don't need audio and want to include a video or presentation in your page that doesn't require a plugin and looks to be supported on a wide range of browsers and platforms, this looks like a compelling option.

[exodust]

The image frames in those examples are 250 x 250. There's no sound. It's video deconstructed into frames then those frames animated to re-form a second-rate appearance of the original video.

I can't believe it's not butter!

Funnily enough it's Flash which is the best performer out of those he lists. Attempting to mask and layer video in HTML5 is a painful scrapheap of half-baked canvas hacking and browser compatibility woes. And then it doesn't work very well anyway even when you finally get the canvas to kick in. Flash eats that kind of thing for breakfast, with easy alpha channels on video layers and so on.

I wish Flash would just make a comeback, improve itself as a mobile plugin for browsers, and we can all enjoy rights-restricted video playback in the browser (at least), and clever next gen web games without paying Apple 30%.