Ubuntu user here, I can't watch any video on apple sites, it says it require quicktime and offers to download safari. Yes, Apple is so walking the walk on that issue...
Interesting. That is hypocritical, you’re right.† Being a Mac user I never have this problem in any browser, except, come to think of it, for the live keynote streams they started doing a few months ago.
Apple even uses JS for use cases where one would traditionally use Flash, such as 3D product views, whereas Google still only uses Flash for Street View.
†Do you have an MPEG-4 decoder? I know a lot of Linux distros, and Firefox, only support e.g. Theora out of the box, for patent reasons.
Edit in response to edit: I know all about the various formats, etc. But <video> absolutely is ready, if you’re willing to support exactly 2 formats (MP4 and Ogg Theora) with a Flash-based fallback — something companies offer as an upload-and-paste-simple service.
> I know all about the various formats, etc. But <video> absolutely is ready
No it's not. Format is just the tip of the iceberg. It still has many issues such as fullscreen not working/implemented differently, many devices have buggy implementations, it still lacks streaming features that flash does and more. The spec is still lacking.
edit: also google "why html5 video is not ready"