HTML 5 videos on youtube take forever to start for me and would just stay at a buffering screen when I use the seekbar. This is in Chrome.
I haven't tried another browser but it has made my youtube experience terrible compared to what is use to be with Flash.
Methinks these issues are specific to your environment. I've seen improved start times and all around better performance, which (for the start time, at least) makes sense considering it's not loading a beefy Flash object.
The only thing that seems to occasionally hang for a second or two is loading a pre-roll ad, but that's pretty reasonable given the additional processes around ad serving. On that note, pretty awesome that those are also HTML5...must be nice to be YouTube and control your own ad format.
Edit: For clarification, not saying I enjoy ads, but having dealt with the bizarre SWF formats that ad vendors pass along...
Interesting. I must've switched on HTML5 streaming ages ago and forgotten about it because I wasn't able to tell it was using flash until I right-clicked the video. I was pretty surprised at how stable it had been.
The only regular issue I have with html5 player is buffering with seeking, some times things get stuck. I often resort to youtube-dl `xsel` | dmenu | mpv to help both cpu usage and streaming quality.
That seems to be a problem with youtube in general. I see that behavior all the time. Several local friend of mine also have these seeking problems, too, so it may depend on the particular cache servers you end up seeing.
I think the problems started when they changed to the "adaptive" rate stuff; the players don't don't download the entire video file anymore, and instead they buffer in segments. Not only does this remove the ability to pre-buffer the entire video, the client seems to get out of sync with the server. The client ends up waiting forever, but the server isn't sending anything.
Fortunately, I was able to switch many of my friends over to youtbe-dl, and that fixed everything. Unfortunately, the article mentions the idiotic "encrypted medfia extensions" a one of the reasons for the changes to youtube; I wonder what additional useless hoops youtube-dl will end up having to have to jump through.
No I meant another kind of issue. The "smart" adaptive buffering was a problem, but 90% of the time you could force seek youtube flash player and wait for the stream to accumulate enough for the video to continue.
With HTML5 (under firefox nightly) sometimes it's really stuck and no acceptable amount of seek and/or wait had any effect on it, so I believe it's another kind of bug.
