Not everyone knows that recently a new technological support for viewing streaming video on the internet has been born, HTML5 more fluid and lighter than the Flash standard that is normally used. HTML5 encoding support is intended to replace the Flash plugin, which always has security and stability issues. the HTML5 project is carried out by Google and Microsoft according to two parallel and alternative ways, which meet with the right plugins.
This prevents some videos from being visible only with Internet Explorer or with Google Chrome.
To avoid an error occurring when trying to start playing an online video, you need to install a plugin that makes it possible to view the videos in any way and format with which they are streamed .
HTML5 now consists of two different formats: Google's WebM and Microsoft's H.264 .
Due to a format war, Internet Explorer does not play WebM videos natively while Google Chrome and Firefox do not play H.264 videos.
The winner of this diatribe remains always the heaviest but compatible Adobe Flash Player which is used on almost all multimedia sites (except Youtube which uses HTML5).
The important thing is, however, to understand if your web browser supports the new viewing formats of online videos, whatever the technology with which they are played.
All this is independent even from the indispensable software and codecs to see all the videos on the computer.
To check if the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera), supports WebM and H.264 videos, you can click on these links to see the following videos:
- WebM Test Video
- H.264 Video test
If there are no errors, then the browser is okay and needs nothing else.
If, on the other hand, one of the two test videos does not work properly, it means that the browser does not have support for playing that video format so you have to add it.
Microsoft recently also released extensions for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome which add H.264 support (Useless and removed today)
Also from Microsoft are available, only for Windows 10, the Web multimedia file extensions to add support to the most used multimedia formats online: OGG container, Vorbis or Theora codec.
Google, on the other hand, has created a plug-in for Internet Explorer, which adds WebM support to the browser: WebM Video for Microsoft Internet Explorer that runs on Windows 7 and Vista.
At the end of the story, all these plugins are already integrated today in all the most updated browsers and their installation is not required, but you can still choose, on Google Chrome, which of the two versions to use .
On a site like Youtube, whose videos are only in HTML5, the Google WebM plugin is obviously used, but it is also possible to use the other version, Microsoft's H.264, by installing the h264fy extension to optimize Youtube if slow and if in HD, lighter and without hardware acceleration.
