Whether it is built into the browser or not means nothing so long as Flash dominates web video. And Adobe will already need to license H.265 because of Premiere.
I've been using the web without Flash installed on my system for months now - an it really surprised me how little I have to jump into Chrome (with its built in flash) to play a video!
Flash is headed for irrelevance - I doubt it will make much difference at all in this format choice. What will matter a lot more is what format mobile devices are able to play.
I've been doing the same. The only time I need to switch to chrome for video is when I want to watch ad-supported videos. One caveat is that most of my video consumption is Youtube, a little from Vimeo and almost nothing from anywhere else.
Other than some minor annoyance of flipping to Chrome, the only real downside to browsing without Flash is that there's a surprisingly number of sites that silently fail without warning if you don't have flash installed. I'm looking at you, eBay.
I'm really curious...do most sites now fall back to HTML5-compatible players even on the desktop?
I'd love to uninstall Flash, but it'd be a major pain if I had to switch over to Chrome every time I wanted to visit an MP3 blog or news site (think CNN or The Verge with their proprietary Flash video players).
EDIT: Also, last I checked, HTML5 videos on YouTube could not be played in "true" fullscreen (they'd only take over the browser window, not your entire screen). Has that changed?
News sites would probably be the ones that would make you flip over to Chrome, as well as MP3 sites I guess. The Verge falls back properly, as do pretty much all YouTube videos.
Most browsers (at least Safari definitely does) do proper full screen too.
I'm not sure if the experience would be as good with Firefox as I'm not sure if they support H.264 yet. But I heard that was planned.
I'd encourage you to try it for a while - it's free and pretty quick to re-install Flash if it gets too annoying.
When serving video, Flash can act as a container for any type of video, as such it can serve VP8/VP9 just fine. There is no technical barrier here.
As for VP9 being a 'non-starter', nonsense. The reason Google is creating their own in-house codec is obvious, 'online' video will be used in an ever-increasing number of services in the future, services which Google wants to provide. As such Google wants their own codec so that they don't have to licence from someone else.
When you record video in your Google Glass or play/record in <insert Google product/service here>, it will use Google's own VPx codec.
I am well aware that Flash can act as a container. But that container by default will have H.265 since Adobe is already a licensee. So why would anybody not use it ?
And Google Glass is vapourware and YouTube/Chrome supports H.264 so not buying the whole Google will put its weight behind VP9 argument. We heard it before with VP8.
Web video players aren't the only application in the world for video codecs. VP9 will be a great option for anyone writing native code, for example phone apps or PC/console games.
Sure. But I was just assuming that VP9 would be similar to VP8 which found most of its usage in a web browser.
But VP9 is pretty much a non starter for any embedded device as well. Apple, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony are patent licensors so they have every reason to use H.265 in their own products. So that takes cares of the majority of all of the mobile and console markets.
Then you still have the situation where even if H.265 and VP9 are supported equally everywhere why would anybody use it. H.265 will be technically superior, be built into the core OS SDKs and have far, far better tool support from content creation to editing to output.
So VP9 is pretty much a non-starter.