Traditional Flash versus new HTML5 video tag

30/06/2009

I’m torn. With the launch of Firefox 3.5, the new video tag might finally kick off for real - allowing you to embed video files in your webpages, which makes hosting and delivering your videos pretty much painless. Flash videos have been around for ages now, but Flash support in Linux is not great, and you need to get some sort of flash video player (I recommend Flowplayer) before being able to embedding them. Of course you also have to transcode your videos to the flash video format.

Of course, if you’re using flash videos you can always use an online service such as YouTube to offload some of the hosting to someone else. If you’re running a website with a lot of traffic, that could be a real money-saver. But if that’s not a problem for you, for example if you don’t have a lot of traffic (or if you’re filthy rich), hosting your own videos might be a good thing - as that will allow you to embed them in whatever format you choose.

On the other hand, not everyone has a browser that supports the video tag, and unless you have a flash video to fall back on, you’re excluding them from viewing your content.

I think that for now I will probably keep hosting my videos on Youtube and embedding them in flash format. While I’m no fan of the .flv format, I realize that from an SEO perspective, hosting the videos there gives me some extra exposure - and that’s always good!

What about you? Will you be sticking to flash video or will you move on to bigger and better things?

Tagged: , , in Web
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Written by Tommy Brunn

Tommy Brunn is the author of blastfromthepast.se. Currently he is living pretty much as close to the north pole as you can get (Luleå, Sweden). He devotes his spare time to learning about programming, developing a FOSS point-and-click adventure game, and is currently studying software engineering at Luleå University of Technology.

There are 5 comments on this article:

  1. 2/07/2009MH said:

    Hosting videos on YouTube isn’t really good from an SEO perspective at all. You might get some traffic from there, but that doesn’t really help you in the search engines, does it?

    On the other hand, hosting videos on your own server gives you the possibility to create embed codes including crawler-trackable links back to your domain.

    Therefore, if your videos could potentially be of interest to others (particularly bloggers, in this case), I’d state quite the opposite.

  2. 2/07/2009Tommy Brunn said:

    You’re absolutely right. What I was trying to say that the added traffic is nice.

    As for the crawler-trackable links, is that something that is currently doable? I thought videos were of no interest to crawlers?

  3. 3/07/2009MH said:

    It’s very doable. We’re actually campaigning to spread the video material on my client’s site, as part of our link building strategy.

    However, I have no idea how it works. I’m not a coder. :/ Might be able to ask around, if you’re interested. Although I don’t see you producing a lot of linkbait videos in the near future anyway… :D

  4. 3/07/2009Tommy Brunn said:

    Please do ask around. I’ve been scouring the internet for information about it, but couldn’t really find anything. All the resources I found suggested the use of external tags, titles etc. But none of them mentioned embedding crawlable content in the video itself.

  5. 5/07/2009Tobias said:

    You two are currently or ever ever the nerdiest people I have ever known. Damn!

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