The new video element in Firefox 3.5, despite having been implemented much earlier by Safari, is making all the rave on the web, especially in the open source community. However, you may still want to stick with Flash for the moment, despite the ability of the video element to simply subtract itself for a flash video if it isn’t supported.
Why? Because the video element has no fallback for browsers that do support the element. Since both browsers currently supporting it do away with different codecs, unless you provide specific sources encoded in two different formats, your video simply won’t play in one or another even if you provided a fallback to Flash.
Safari’s support is preliminary too. On Mac it may be fast, but its support is limited to what’s available in QuickTime, which is very slow on Windows. Having complex h.264 videos that easily play in Flash will kill your Safari with the video element, even with a dual-core processor.
Additionally, as mentioned, support is browser-based, much like images. It’s great because it means your user won’t have to install any codecs, but Theora isn’t the best compression you can get for video out there and you’re stuck using it for Firefox’s video element because that’s the only codec its engine supports.
Oh and talking about bandwidth cost reduction with more efficient codecs like h.264, the video element also does not support streaming protocols, which again, is something that would have to be implemented individually in every browser.
Flash is also arguably much more flexible. The video element allows to be controlled by JavaScript, but for now, it’s just about basics and native controls of each browser are also very inconsistent in both appearance and functionality, preventing users of one browser or another to have the same experience on your website.
In other words, the video element for now is what I consider nothing more than a gimmick for Linux freaks.
