

HTML5 vs Flash Video: Battery performance analysis - notregistering
http://iss.oy.ne.ro/HTML5-Video-Battery

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themgt
I feel like this post has a bit of a strangely recursive backstory (as he
explains along the way): he was helped by people from Youtube and Google to
get hardware running Google operating systems so he could test their battery
life while using a Google web browser to watch Youtube, a Google site, and the
punchline is that you the user should flip a toggle in your Google/Youtube
account.

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DigitalSea
This hardly seems like a conclusive test to me, it's the beginning. Testing
performance across various devices and different versions of Android (although
based on these current tests probably extremely difficult) ia the only true
way to reach a definitive conclusion on HTML5 vs Flash battery drain.

Having said that, based on experience with various Flash-capable devices over
the years I've noticed in Chrome especially Flash performance is horrible. I
think Flash is severely broken in Chrome as even on my Core i7 laptop which is
no slouch, it seems to manage sometimes 50% + CPU usage in Chrome and cause
the CPU fan to really start spinning up to cool it down. It's no secret that
Flash compared to HTML5 looks like an aging hatchback, but HTML5 video is
nowhere near the scale of Flash just yet (in terms of market penetration or
feature-set), at least not yet.

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asperous
Make sure you have only one flash enabled in your plugin settings, if you have
two different flash plugins running they will fight to be the chosen one and
most likely lag and crash your browser.

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yossioren
Hello! I'm Yossi, the guy who put up the web page. Thanks for the attention!

About your questions. These power analysis tests are destructive to the device
under test, since I have to splice into the power supply line. I used a google
tablet and a chromebook because the guys at google were kind enough (and their
corporate culture functional enough) to give them to me. Obviously I would
love to do this to additional hardware ( _cough_ macbookpro _cough_ ) but
somebody would have to donate one.

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mmastrac
Anyone know if that Android tablet has H264 hardware-assisted decoding
onboard? If it does, then the myth that H264 was more efficient for power use
is basically busted.

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lukegb
That's not an Android tablet - it's a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. It'd be
interesting to see what the results were like across different operating
systems.

~~~
lukegb
Oops - not entirely sure how I missed the tablet - completely blanked it when
I read that page. Sorry!

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achivetta
Does anyone know if either of these platforms support hardware accelerated
H.264 decoding? And, do either HTML5 or Flash in these environments support
using it?

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cpncrunch
Flash is just a cpu hog in general...and any time I watch a flash video my
laptop really starts to heat up.

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ars
I like flash because I don't actually watch it on the webpage - I let flash
queue up the video, them play it with mplayer.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3094948> see my reply for the
script. And I use <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13333> with settings to
switch to high resolution, then start queuing and pause.

HTML5 video queues very very badly. It doesn't delete the video till the
browser is closed, and had some other issues (I don't remember them all - it's
been a year since I tried it).

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mehrdada
Battery capacity, i.e. the amount of energy that a battery stores, is measured
in Watt-hours (or Joules), not (milli)Ampere-hours. Without knowing the
voltages, comparing two batteries based on their mAh rating is meaningless.

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kenjackson
I'd be curious to see this data on Windows. On the Surface RT Flash seems to
perform really well. How much of the issue is Flash vs how much of the issue
is Android?

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ryanpetrich
And how much of the issue is platform specific optimizations that have only
been performed on the Win32 version of Flash and not elsewhere?

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quackerhacker
Nice testing! I've done a TON of video compression and I agree that flash is
cpu intensive, but I believe depending on the compression algorithm for mp4
(i.e. baseline, high, ultra, etc.) it can draw more power on the end user's
device, but I think it's negligible when compared to flash.

Side Note: HTML5 videos may not use alot of power for playback (gpu), but try
video compression (cpu) on a mobile device...HA!

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_pmf_
The sad thing is that today, transmitting and decoding a mostly text based web
site (pulling in some MB of Javascript malware/libraries) is less efficient
than transmitting a video stream.

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glitchdout
I would enable HTML5 in Youtube if it had feature parity with Flash. Not
having a fullscreen option when embedded is what kills it for me.

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kevingadd
I think HTML5 video can do fullscreen even in embeds, but you have to
explicitly enable it on the iframe when you embed the video. By default HTML5
content in iframes can't go fullscreen unless you set the attribute on the
iframe (Flash ignores this, of course)

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jokoon
Why is youtube not using vp6 by default ? this baffles me. it is a advertising
problem ?

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ck2
One is hardware assisted, one is not?

