Online video

[ewx]

I think the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some time.

There's certainly some good stuff out there, and spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing, and there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium; but an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video where previously the same material would have been online in text form - you don't get the notes of someone's presentation online, you just get the video.

To my mind the three biggest disadvantages of video over an article, or a transcript, or even just a decent set of slides, are:

• They dictate pacing. You can read at any pace you like, with a video you're stuck with the pacing its creator chose, and at least for me inevitably limited to a rather slower pace than I can read at. This isn't just about normal reading speed, you can skim text in a way that's rather difficult with a video.
• They have sound. A nuisance in a shared environment or if you wanted to do something else with your ears (listen to background music or for a knock at the door, for instance).
• Interruption is costly. If something interrupts reading text you can 'passively' stop, and when you return to it you can just scan back up a bit for enough context to get going again. If something interrupts watching a video you have to actively find the pause button, and if you wanted to pick up context when returning to it you have to fiddle with the rewind controls (which might well be a not-big-enough slider, but that's an implementation detail).

You can't print them out either, but I almost never print anything out to read it, so that one's pretty much moot from my point of view.

Comments

[shortcipher]

I think HTML 5 is supposed to contain a(nother) way to embed video without using Flash, hopefully offering people whatever it is they think they need that OBJECT doesn't provide. This has the added benefit of providing the same player UI for all sites, perhaps customisable by the user, rather than a billion different dodgy Flash-based players, each with their own bugs.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

An effort somewhat sabotaged by Nokia, as I recall...

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I can understand Bokia et al's sabotage, as long as submarine patents exist mandating a format like Ogg Theora is always going to give companies the fear, look at what happened with gif.

Having a standard <video> element is still a good thing, it's sat there in the DOM with a standard interface for doing things to it, it can be styled along with everything else, and it will save things like the iPhone having to either work out that an attempt to embed some flash is really a link to a video over there, or dig through the flash itself to find the link.