HTML5 has been at the center of a heated argument in the recent months and it’s only getting worse. Specifically, it’s HTML5-based video that is raising spirits when pitted against Adobe’s Flash Player. Apple has notoriously refused to include Flash on the iPhone and iPad and had some very harsh words for the technology. Adobe didn’t let up with the counter-rhetoric, while declaring its ‘love’ for Apple.

But, when it comes down to it, is the web ready for HTML5 video? A new study by MeFeedia, a video-search engine and indexer, shows that only 26 percent of all online videos are encoded in H.264, or a format compatible with HTML5. The study looked at over 30,000 individual video sources and millions of videos, checking the video compression format they were encoded with.

“MeFeedia’s index encompasses videos from a huge variety of sources (over 30,000 of them). This includes a number of content partners such as Hulu, CBS & ABC as well as video from popular sites including YouTube, Vimeo & DailyMotion,” a post on the MeFeedia blog reads.

“We used our extensive video index for this analysis. With some of the larger sites (like YouTube) where we may not index every single video, we took the video data that we had and extrapolated based on very large data sets (millions of videos),” it explains.

The number doesn’t look too promising, certainly there is a lot of work to be done before HTML5 video is a viable option. Still, this number has seen a huge rise since just a few months ago. In January 2010, only ten percent of online videos were encoded in an HTML5-friendly format. However, just because the video is encoded with H.264 or other compatible codecs, it doesn’t mean that 26 percent of the world’s videos are streamed with HTML5 players, as Flash supports H.264 as well. What’s more, plenty of browsers that do support HTML5 don’t support H.264.