A talk about Front-end Performance at YouTube.

HTML5; it's new, it's awesome, and it's powerful, but can it take down the champ of video distribution, Flash. Which technology's got the ability to bring cat video to the next level? This talk covers the many challenges of both HTML5 and YouTube adapting to change video distribution on the web.

YouTube players allow for video playback in web applications. The latest YouTube's embedded iframe player supports both Flash and HTML5 video and exposes a rich API which lets you control the YouTube playback experience. We'll give you details on how the API was developed, and show you how it can power the videos on your own website.

This is the story of the glory and struggle of bringing a high quality YouTube experience to the mobile web. Once upon a time there was a web developer who wanted to play videos on the web. So he filmed a cat and wrote a Flash and a HTML5 player. He spent many hours making it work on his favorite desktop browsers and even the one his grandfather still used. People could watch his cat video, he smiled, and the world was good. Then one day someone put a browser in a phone and soon there were many phones with many different browsers. This new set of environments were even harder to develop for and had a slew of new terrifying bugs. The web developer was miserable knowing people couldn't watch his cat video. With much time and effort he figured out many of the secrets needed to combat the evils of the different mobile platforms. Once again people could watch his cat video, he smiled, and the world was good. The end.

Is HTML5 ready for production code? Of course it is. This is a look into all the different HTML5 technologies we use in live code at YouTube. We'll have a collection of tips, tricks, and best practices for HTML5 video, the track tag, getUserMedia, and more. Plus a deep dive into Mobile Video Tag development.