I re-implemented newTube.js, an earlier experiment to embed HTML5 YouTube video, into my WP YouTube Lyte plugin. This means that WP YouTube Lyte (for easy lite YouTube embeds, reducing download size & rendering time substantially) can now also use the HTML5-based YouTube video-player to play your embedded video.
If the -experimental- HTML5 option is enabled, WP YouTube Lyte will embed HTML5 YouTube video if:
- Your visitor uses a browsers that supports the h264 (Safari, Chrome, IE9) or WebM (currently development versions of Chrome, Opera and Firefox) video codecs
- Your visitor is enrolled in the YouTube html5 beta
If these requirements aren’t met, your visitors will see a Flash-based version of the YouTube video you specified.
As newTube.js is sort of a dirty hack which replaces the LYTE dummy player with an iframe with overflow:hidden, in which the full YouTube-page is carefully positioned to display only the player, there are some other caveats to take into account as well:
- It might break if YouTube implements x-frame-options for their video-pages
- Positioning of the player might be a few pixels off in some browsers
- Some buttons in the embedded player (e.g. view full screen) won’t function properly
- This might (not) work on iPhone/ iPod/ iPad’s (there are known issues with iframes & overflow in mobile Safari that might affect html5 embedding, feedback is welcome)
But apart from all this small print, is works rather nice if I may say so myself. Or better still, just look at this little They Might Be Giants gem embedded here;
