Flash Player and YouTube

YouTube is experimenting with HTML5 video - you should be able to sign up for that. I keep Flash installed, however, as not all video sites are using the HTML5 processing yet.

Nothing wrong with Flash player - you should give it a try and you can watch most of the videos on the web.

Clinton

Or use Chrome browser for Youtube, which provides Flash in a sand-boxed environment.

I don't know what else to say - I can watch the videos just fine from either site you posted. So I'm not experiencing what you are experiencing. But then I do have Flash player installed... I don't use Safari, either, I use Firefox.

Clinton

Rosario Ciccarelli wrote:

I was simply asking why the same video that I can't watch on YouTube because Flash, it perfectly works if it is linked within a website or a blog, as well as the example of the Led Zeppelin one above? Do you experience the same thing? And can you explain that?

The Led Zep site shows a low feature HTML 5 version and a feature rich Flash version.

Clicking the YouTube link on a Mac goes to the YouTube Flash based version, if Flash is not enabled or installed, it asks you to install it to watch the video.

Both versions of the video are hosted on YouTube.

What Google is likely doing is detecting (by your OS version) if your machine can handle Flash and if it does, then asks you to install it. If it's a low performance iOS device, it's displaying the lower feature HMTL 5 version.

Google is catering to the 95% of Windows + Mac users who's machines are capable of running Flash without a problem and offer them (and those who created the video) more features and ability that Flash offers over HTML 5.

The default install on new computers is no Flash, so unless people are encouraged to install it, they won't and just accept the less feature rich HTML 5 version.

Google is not trying to make Flash irrelevant by displaying both a HTML 5 and a Flash version at the same time.

Google doesn't have a hardware platform to force their will unlike Microsoft and Apple does, so they are natural allies of Adobe and Flash, keeping hardware and operating systems open. In fact Chrome handles Flash itself, when Safari and IE don't.

Rosario Ciccarelli wrote:

...is that the same reason because it doesn't happen with iPhone? I mean, that's why it's possible to watch all the YouTube videos on iPhone, just because its iOS can't handle Flash?

It has to do with the processor performance capability of the device your using.

iOS devices currently don't have powerful processors and elaborate cooling to handle more feature rich content which Flash provides.

Flash was written in the time that all computers were essentially open platforms, adequate cooling/power and increased in performance capability according to Moore's Law.

Apple issued recent closed operating system iOS devices with LESS processor performance capability as to avoid elaborate cooling and large batteries, so Flash was determined not to jive with those requirements.

Flash has been attempted to run on Android tablets and netbooks, but it's too processor intensive for those low performance machines.

Since there is now two classes of web surfing devices, low and higher performance, one gets HTML 5 and one gets Flash accordingly.

I hope this answers your question. 🙂