Saturday, February 2, 2013

Having trouble with YouTube videos? Try HTML5

Many of the videos here on Anime Dossier require a flash player of some sorts to play them. While this is naturally already a part of Google Chrome and can be fixed with other browsers by installing Adobe's Flash Player, you might be stuck on a device while browsing this site and not have access to either Chrome or flash. In these cases, HTML5 can deliver.

Simply go to YouTube's HTML5 portion of the website, and click "Opt In" and you will be able to view all YouTube-based videos just fine with sound and everything, all without a flash plugin. The catch: you must be using a modern web browser that adheres to their requirements:

Firefox 4
Google Chrome
Opera 10.6+
Apple Safari (h.264, version 4+)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 with Google Chrome Frame installed

The other videos on Anime Dossier that are flash-based sadly require either Google Chrome or a plugin to get them to play.

The reason I mention this is because I've recently installed an old, unsupported version of the Linux-based Ubuntu on one of my computers and absolutely could not find a way to install flash on the system, since everything is either unsupported at this point or requires extensive knowledge of the OS, which I do not have. Alternatively I downloaded Opera and using its HTML5 playback I was able to get at least the YouTube videos playing.

So if you are for whatever reason struggling to get flash to work on your viewing device while on this website, then HTML5 at least works for the YouTube-based anime series.

Quality, free anime is something this site is made for, and if someone can't access that content because of something like flash plugin, just know that there is another alternative.

YouTube's HMTL5 page