YouTube Does Away with Flash Embeds, Flash API

Making an advanced move to improve its video streaming experience, Google just announced that it will now adopt the HTML5 player to facilitate YouTube embeds, moving to iframes. And this is not all, the company is also deprecating the Flash <object> embeds and their Flash API declaring them as obsolete. The company seems to encourage embeddes across the world to use the iframe API. It has been noted to be capable of intelligently picking any technology supported by the client.

Google shared in a blog post how it wrote about YouTube’s early reinforcement for the HTML5 <video> tag four years ago and how it had performed as compared to Flash. The company admitted to several limitations back then which kept HTML5 from taking the place of its preferred platform for delivering quality videos through YouTube. The biggest challenge at the time was that HTML5 lacked the necessary support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets the company deliver more videos with minimal buffering. The company also shared that during the past four years, it has invested its efforts with browser vendors as well as the broader community to bridge such gaps. Finally, YouTube has now come to use HTML5 <video> by default in Chrome, IE 11, as well as Safari 8 and in the beta versions of Firefox.

The benefits of HTML5 draw out much beyond web browsers because of which it is being welcomed in smart TVs as well as other streaming devices because of its benefits.

For the big move, Google acknowledges technologies such as MediaSource extensions the VP9 codec, encrypted media extensions and common encryption, WebRTC, and Fullscreen with progressing HTML5 video. The company has notes that other companies including Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, and Vimeo have all adopted HTML5. Google also appreciates HTML5 for modifying devices of new classes such as Chromebooks and Chromecast. As per the company, developers have been asked to support HTML5 by using the iframe API wherever you embed videos on the Internet.