As browsers have slowly adopted HTML5 video we’ve seen considerable potential, but very little polish. The HTML5 video experience just hasn’t yet risen to the beautiful and functional experience provided by Flash—until now.
Jilion’s SublimeVideo product hopes to change that with the newest beta of their HTML5 Video Player. The player is a solution that the company hopes will be broadly adopted as a uniform, cross-browser and multi-codec HTML5 video solution. Requiring no browser plugin, the SublimeVideo player brings full-screen video, gorgeous zooming transitions, custom style controls and snappy timeline scrubbing to the playing field. More indicative of its beta status, the player currently lacks volume control, but Jilion says that the feature is in the works.
Due to the ongoing H.264 vs. Theora conflict, SublimeVideo only supports the H.264-powered Safari and Chrome, but support for Theora and Firefox is also on the way. Internet Explorer support is also planned, but the player will resort to Flash to do so.
SublimeVideo has thus far been generating some positive buzz, as well as a bit of realistic criticism, but it’s important to realize that SublimeVideo is not yet a Flash video killer. It’s not even production-ready unless you have an audience that overwhelmingly favors Safari and Chrome. It’s also not that great for video producers, as it takes extra time to encode multiple versions of a video for different bandwidths.
These issues are not really what’s important here, though. SublimeVideo is a beautiful proof-of-concept that shows what HTML5 can do even before it becomes practical to implement–it’s an exciting glimpse of a future without Flash.
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