Just a Gwai Lo: Notes

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Video

For almost all web video, people seem to prefer YouTube and Vimeo as their hosting provider. I have enabled HTML5 video on both YouTube and Vimeo. Since I try to keep my browsing experience for the web contained within Safari with Flash removed (as if I had bought a new computer without Flash installed), I sometimes load Chrome for when Flash is absolutely necessary. (It's the John Gruber Way, slightly modified to use AppleScript to copy the current Safari tab into a new Chrome tab and FastScripts to assign a keyboard shortcut.) 

Watching video on the web continues to frustrate. HTML5 for the most part eliminates the fan running (the original impetus for Gruber's decision) but there remain other annoyances:

  • The need for a plugin to change embed codes on websites to use the HTML5 player.
  • occasional white screen when maximizing an HD video
  • playing the video runs up against the buffer, which induces stress. This might partly be an issue with connection speed. I still have to play a video then pause so that it can buffer, wait a minute or two if the video is particularly long, and then hope that the playback doesn't catch up with the buffer.