John Gruber, wrote an interesting piece on HTML5 Video embedding on his Daring Fireball blog yesterday title “[Why the HTML5 'Video' Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in Browsers Which Support It](http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/html5_video_unusable)”
The first thing I noted of interest is that even for a leading edge person like John HTML5 video is still not ready for general usage. I’ll probably do a follow up post on my thoughts on why this is not ready (multi-encoding, fallback code, etc etc)
What I want to talk about is John’s footnote on Flash Video
> *As for why I refuse to embed Flash, let me put it this way. I use and highly recommend ClickToFlash, which blocks all Flash content by default. Why would I publish content using a technology that I personally block by default? I truly hope to see Flash fade as the de facto standard for embedded web video, and I’m willing to put my markup where my mouth is.*
I think HTML5 video is going to be good and provide some significant inroads into what we do with video on the web. However I think that John misses one key reasons as to why flash video is going to stick around for a bit …
It enables video sharing sites and video services such as ourselves to provide a single player packed with functionality. With our [vzaar](http://vzaar.com) video player (and equally with our competitors video players, video player developers like [Flowplayer](http://flowplayer.org/) and the video sharing sites) this allows us to put together a whole package of functions for example our [border colours](http://vzaar.com/features/player_colours) or [brand text](http://vzaar.com/features/brand_text_link).
Additionally as a business, this allows us to restrict some of those features to paying users only. All in one simple prepacked flash file. This makes the embed code simpler (although not perfectly simple, thanks Firefox, thanks embed tag).
This is possible in HTML5, as [Mark Pilgrim said in reply to my comment on reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9u7cr/video_on_the_web_dive_into_html5/c0egqsp). However possible, and ready for prime time, ready for normal users isn’t the same thing.
Top player design in HTML5 with Javascript and styles is all possible, but mostly if you have complete control of the environment, and you run your own site. e.g. It would work for John himself and as it does for Apple ([e.g.](http://www.apple.com/imac/the-new-imac/#medium)) However for many of our users this wouldn’t work. We have a broad base of users with technical skills from being able to cut and paste HTML (and for many of our [eBay users](http://vzaar.com/features/add_to_ebay) not even that) to [leading design agencies](http://www.fallon.co.uk/) who value the easy of use of not having to worry about this.
When it comes to embedding video all over other sites, I still firmly believe that flash for all it’s flaws, is the the only viable way to make sure the video will work cross site, cross browser. For flash to be truly replaced by pure HTML, I believe that we not only need HTML5 to gain greater adoption, but a better way of embedding widgets (such as video players) with one block of code. I’d be very surprised if as HTML5 gains adoption, a new packaged “widget” format doesn’t develop to take on flash.
However without a viable way of embedding blocks of rich functionality on other webpages, that you know will work across all bowser types, flash is here to stay.