Anyone else get dropped frames with html5 video?

[ExperimentalAnimations]

Whether its webm or theora, chrome or firefox, theres constant framedropping. Not sure whats causing it, or if html5 video support is just garbage, but i hope not as everything is moving towards it.

[chan8452]

This is great...reading material for days!

[benwaggoner]

There's nothing magical about putting a video decoder into a web browser that'll give perfect performance. In fact, the browser enviornment is a lot more hostile towards media playback since it has a rich compositing model which can prevent a lot of classic acceleration features from working. Also, HTML isn't something that's had a clear conecpt of frame rate and enforced sync.

It's kind of like where we were with software media playback in the 90's, where some architectural changes to the PC were required to get rock-solid media playback. Things seem pretty solid in IE9, since it requries an OS that almost always has hardware video decode and GPU-based compositing. And MediaFoundation is more than capable of smooth playback.

Things will be harder with multiplatform browsers, since different solutions are required for different platforms.

Hardware decoder support is the key feature to make all this work, as it means that the JScript JIT can't eat up all the CPU, leaving insufficient resources for a software decoder. Things can get pretty scary when you consider how many tabs each with their own media stuff playing in them. We can't assume that media playback has exclusive use of most system resources like we did in classic use models.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Assuming you have a compatible GPU or Windows 7, try the latest Firefox 4 beta - it should have hardware acceleration for HTML5 video.