Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Jul 2009 18:51 UTC, submitted by snydeq
We here at OSNews have taken somewhat of an interest in the new HTML5 video and audio tags, which should - some day - make embedding audio and video material into web pages as easy and straightforward as embedding images, allowing the web to finally remove the shackles of dreadful Flash video. Sadly, the problem with these new tags are the codecs; as it turns out, browser makers have not reached an agreement about what codecs to choose for video, with mostly Apple throwing a spanner in the works, and Microsoft shining in absence.
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RE[2]: Simple solution
by modmans2ndcoming on Fri 3rd Jul 2009 02:55
in reply to "RE: Simple solution"
Member since:2005-11-09
how many people does the content owner want to view his/her stuff?
Lets get the tag working now and let the browser vendors worry about codec licensing later. I guarantee, if they offer Ogg (supported in FF) and VC-1(Supported in IE I am sure) and h.264(supported in webkit) They will cover everyone that needs to worry about it. Eventually the codecs will get worked out and everyone will allow free decoding capabilities to the other vendors. What is really at issue however is as video improves, will browser vendors implement the new standards? jpeg2000 anyone? The best thing to do is provide codec plugins for the browsers. The video tag is really there to make it easy for the site developer.
Edited 2009-07-03 02:56 UTC
RE[3]: Simple solution
by StephenBeDoper on Sat 4th Jul 2009 00:00
in reply to "RE[2]: Simple solution"
Member since:2005-07-06
I guarantee, if they offer Ogg (supported in FF) and VC-1(Supported in IE I am sure) and h.264(supported in webkit) They will cover everyone that needs to worry about it.
If you run a site that hosts/publishes video content and that's your primary goal (having your content viewable by as many users as possible, without the need for them to install additional software), then there is already a technology which meets that requirement: Flash. While there are certainly issues with Flash video, they are (IMO) not severe enough to provide a compelling reason to ditch the technology altogether - at least not when the alternative solution requires 3 separate versions of each video instead of one (along with the extra time to create the additional versions of each video, both in terms of human effort and processing power, and the 3x increase in diskspace needed to store the files, etc).
The solution you describe is not much different from what we had in the "bad old days" - except back then you had to provide Quicktime, WMV, and RealMedia versions of each video instead of OGG, h.264 and VC1. And that option effectively lost out to Flash - largely because (again, IMO) Flash support was, and still is, more ubiquitous than support for any of the video formats being pushed as a standard for web video.
So if Flash won out due to its ubiquity, then it stands to reason that the only way to displace Flash is with a technology that's more ubiquitous than Flash (and therefore more convenient for content publishers). The HTML5 video tag could provide that - but not without a video format that's consistently supported by all of the major browsers.
Of course, this all assumes that the use of Flash video is an issue that needs to be "fixed" somehow (a premise that I don't entirely agree with).
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Member since:
2007-08-06
Fallback in browser support is available:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_audio_and_video_in_Firefox
Rather I would ask "How may different versions of files content providers bother to encode?"