Over the past week, there has been a lot of posts about when a HTML5 player will come to Twitch. A question both viewers and broadcasters have been asking for quite some time. Twitch Staff member kixelated gave the Twitch Subreddit an update of what is going on and when they can expect it. Here is the link to the post of the original thread of kixelated’s comment, and here is the link to the recent one that was posted today. Below is the quote we pulled explaining the process.
“Hey, so I’m the guy working on the HTML5 player at Twitch. I left a status update a few months ago and there’s been a lot of progress since.
The underlying HTML5 video playback works great and we’ve been testing it internally for a few months. The problem is that we do EVERYTHING in Flash right now, so we have to port every feature one-by-one into HTML/JS before we can release the player. We also can’t completely remove Flash, because browser support for MSE is still missing for Firefox and older Safari/IE browsers.
So, we decided to split the HTML5 player into two releases: 1) move the UI into HTML/JS and 2) move the video into HTML/JS. The new player UI, is pretty swanky and we’ll start rolling it out to users in a few weeks. You’ll notice the new HTML interface immediately but the underlying video player will still be Flash.
After that gets released we can fully focus on the HTML5 video element and release an alpha. I don’t have any dates for it but I personally want to release something asap (even with the current bugs). It’s unoptimized but still uses a third of the cpu and a fraction of the memory compared to our current Flash player. I’ll try to keep you guys updated.”
