The YouTube team announced yesterday that it has begun trials of a new player based on the fledgling HTML5 video standard.
HTML5 is the next generation of the basic language used to design and present websites: HyperText Markup Language. Version five brings many enhancements that will improve the visual experience and performance of webpages but, most notably for YouTube users, it offers the ability to play music and video without a plugin like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Of the new HTML5 player, YouTube developers were quick to address limitations saying, “Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn’t support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video (currently that means [Chrome and Safari]).”
The YouTube team has openly invited Chrome and Safari users interested in participating in the HTML5 experiment to join the program through the HTML5 Video Player beta signup. Firefox and Internet Explorer users, meanwhile, must be content to wait out a protracted standards war centered around licensing fees for H.264, the video codec of choice for YouTube’s HTML5 implementation.
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