For now, Adobe Flash is the closest web video comes to having one single unified standard, but unfortunately it has its own set of problems.The full version is not at all ubiquitous on mobile devices, which are becoming increasingly important. The iPhone, for example, does not have Flash. The plugin is notorious for crashing browsers, hogging CPU resources and performing poorly. Even if Adobe were to address all of these issues, placing full control of web video in the hands of a single company and their proprietary format is a bad idea.

Another format war?

What is needed for Web video is one single unified, efficient, and hardware-accelerated standard that is not under the sole control of a single company. The W3C tried to get us there by adding <audio> and <video> tags to HTML5, but was drawn into a controversy over which format to support.

Apple, Google/YouTube, and Nokia favor H.264, which is widely implemented and has hardware acceleration. Mozilla, Wikipedia, Opera, and Dailymotion favor Theora, a completely open format. Apple and Nokia fear unknown patent issues with Theora, and Google doesn’t consider it efficient enough. Theora’s supporters dislike H.264′s royalty fees. YouTube uses H.264 but not Theora, and Firefox 3.5 does the opposite.

Uncertain conclusion

Both codecs have some important proponents supporting them, but in some key areas H.264 has advantages over Theora. It’s built into commonly used video editing software, used by YouTube, and has hardware acceleration so that it works in devices like the iPhone. Microsoft has a possible conflict of interest and has yet to announce Internet Explorer support for the <audio> and <video> portions of HTML5. It’s unfortunate that standardized web video is being held back by this mess, but I hope it will eventually come to be.

See also: “Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate” by Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul.

720p video from YouTube. Yes, YouTube. Click to enlarge.

Update: My bookmarklet has been broken by Google, but the script it was based on has been fixed and has added support for 720p HD downloading. Use that instead.

In addition to expanding their player to 960px wide for all videos, YouTube received a more quiet upgrade today. In addition to normal quality and high quality, they have now added 720p HD video. Few HD YouTube videos exist at the moment, but for those that do you can simply append &fmt=22 to the end of the URL. Interestingly, I seem to be the first to have figured out how to actually download (rather than stream) these new 720p HD videos directly from YouTube.

Simply drag this link to your bookmarks bar:  DL YouTube HD

This is what is known as a bookmarklet, a JavaScript bookmark able to act on the current page. To use it, find a YouTube video that’s available in 720p (example). Click on the bookmarklet, and at the bottom of the gray info box on the right a link labled “Download as 720p HD MP4″ will appear. Right-click and save, and the download will begin.

Credits: My bookmarklet is a modification of googlesystem.blogspot.com’s bookmarklet for downloading high quality (but not HD) YouTube videos, which I found via robotdestroy on MacOSXHints.

Update: After seeing my bookmarklet, Nathan Hammond took it even further by making his own bookmarklet that automatically starts the download. Very nice!