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In January, YouTube launched a player that used the HTML5 video tag. To try this player, you have to go to youtube.com/html5 and enable the player. If you have a browser that supports the video tag and the YouTube video doesn’t use captions, annotations and doesn’t show ads, you’ll be able to watch the video in YouTube’s HTML5 player.

What if you want to switch to the HTML5 player for a single video or you want to link to the HTML5 version? YouTube has a special parameter that lets you do that: just append “&html5=True” to the video’s address. Here’s an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTl3U6aSd2w&html5=True (link)

For now, YouTube’s HTML5 player works in Google Chrome (h.264; Chrome 6 adds support for WebM), Opera 10.6+ (WebM), Safari 4+ (h.264) and Firefox 4 (WebM).

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Ever since YouTube started testing an HTML5 interface I wondered why YouTube’s embedding code is not future proof. YouTube’s code creates a Flash object and can’t take advantage of the native support for videos in modern browsers. YouTube will always have to support the existing Flash player, but it’s strange to see that the embedding code isn’t more flexible.

YouTube API Blog announces that YouTube will switch to a new embedding code that uses an iframe. “If you use the new embed code style, your viewers will be able to view your embedded video in one of our Flash or HTML5 players, depending on their viewing environment and preferences. In instances where HTML5 isn’t supported (e.g. our HTML5 player can’t play videos with ads), we use Flash.”

Here’s an example of embed code:

<iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID" frameborder="0">
</iframe>

YouTube says that “an additional benefit of the new embed style is that it will eventually allow embeds to work on mobile devices, which typically use a built-in player instead of Flash or HTML5.” iPhone, Android phones and other mobile devices use a special application for YouTube, while mobile browsers use plug-ins that detect YouTube’s embedding code and replace it with some code that can be handled by the built-in YouTube app. The new embedding code will allow YouTube to use the HTML5 video tag in browsers that support this feature.

In a previous post, YouTube’s Kuan Yong said that “Flash Player’s ability to combine application code and resources into a secure, efficient package has been instrumental in allowing YouTube videos to be embedded in other web sites. Web site owners need to ensure that embedded content is not able to access private user information on the containing page, and we need to ensure that our video player logic travels with the video (for features like captions, annotations, and advertising). While HTML5 adds sandboxing and message-passing functionality, Flash is the only mechanism most web sites allow for embedded content from other sites.”

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YouTube’s player has a clever Easter egg: make sure the player has focus, press the left arrow on your keyboard for about 2 seconds and you can play Snake while watching the video.

This trick only works in YouTube’s new player, which is only available for videos that don’t include annotations or ads. It’s limited to the videos played on YouTube’s site and it doesn’t work for embedded videos. Here’s an example of video you can use to play Snake.

YouTube is not the only Google product that lets you play games. Gmail has a Labs feature called “old Snakey” that adds a Snake game inside Gmail.

{ via TheNextWeb. Thanks, Kevin. }

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YouTube started to show a persistent bar at the bottom of the page that shows the videos from the active playlist. For example, if you click on a video from your subscriptions, the bar lists other recent videos uploaded by your favorite users. Click on one of your favorite videos and the bar is populated with the rest of the videos. The bar is also useful if you add videos to the queue, a temporary playlist built dynamically.

Sterling, a reader of this blog who noticed the new bar, found an annoyance: “Even if the cursor isn’t over the bar, it still pops up, so if you go rate a video, favorite or share it, as soon as you move near the bar, it pops up, blocking those settings, so you have to either scroll down or click on the bar to collapse it. It looks like the spot where the bar is triggered is just above where the video player ends when it’s in shrink mode.”

Once you collapse the bar, it no longer auto-expands, at least until you watch a new video. I couldn’t find a setting that disables the bar or moves it to its original position.

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

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