Google is beta testing HTML5 for video playback on YouTube, and my initial impressions of the technology are not good at all.  A few months earlier, I couldn’t get Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Google Chrome to run HTML5 video.  I am now able to get the latest version of Chrome to render the video (Apple Safari apparently is the only other browser supported at present time), but the results look terrible in its current stage.

Figure 1: YouTube HTML5 beta interface

As you can see in Figure 1, the rendering is horrible compared to Figure 2 in Adobe Flash mode.  The image scaling looks like it merely using pixel duplication rather than something decent like cubic interpolation or something good like Lanczos3.  That’s why the image looks extremely blocky and pixilated.  There’s no apparent support for 480P, 720P, or 1080P either.

Figure 2: YouTube Flash 10 interface

In Figure 2, we see a mature Flash 10 interface with much nicer quality image rendering as well as higher resolution support.  This isn’t to say that there’s fundamentally something wrong with HTML5, just that the current implementation on YouTube has a long way to go before it can replace Flash.  This is a major issue for iPhone/iPod/iPad users and Steve Jobs is throwing his whole weight behind HTML5 and has no intention of supporting Adobe Flash.

There’s good reason not to like Flash as it is very buggy and full of security holes that expose its host operating system to nasty malware attacks.  Furthermore, the performance of Flash on many laptops and nearly all netbooks is horrible short of having a really fast laptop with rarely deployed dedicated graphics hardware.  Microsoft Silverlight (which has been beta tested on iPhone) performs much better on similar hardware than Adobe Flash so there’s a possibility that HTML5 mode might also perform better.  But until the implementation becomes much more mature and capable, HTML5 doesn’t even look to be worthy of being “beta”.