HTML 5 ditches native video support | The Coffeehouse

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Jul 6th @ 4:00 PM

None of the Silverlight players I've used have an active scrubber, whereas youtube's Flash player does.

CannotResolveSymbol
{insert caption here}

In reply to W3bbo

#Jul 6th @ 3:53 PM

At least in the existing implementations (Firefox's Ogg Theora and Safari's H.264), a plugin isn't used to play back content in a <video> tag; the necessary codecs are embedded in the browser itself and video becomes a first-class citizen on the page, like images or text... Mozilla has some pretty cool demos where they do CSS transforms and animation on running video.

magicalclick

Yeah, I don't get it. Why not just use Flash or Silverlight? Silverlight is pretty good movie player, and you can do interactive menu and stuff. The <video> tag has a lot of issues about streaming and custom stuff like interactive menu and GUI.

LinWinOverlord

In reply to CannotResolveSymbol

#Jul 6th @ 4:24 PM

It isn't quite true that Safari includes the H.264 codec within the browser. Technically, what Safari does is that it connects to QuickTime and uses the QuickTime engine to play back the video.

There are already QuickTime codecs for Theora, but the problem is that Apple refuses to either include them or reference them at all on the web page for QuickTime codecs on Apple's website.

Mozilla does actually include the codecs within the browser code. Easier to maintain for them, from what I guess. I have no doubt that Microsoft will never include Theora support. As far as I know, the only time Microsoft ever acknowledged that Ogg codecs was when they included Vorbis in the original Xbox, I don't even know if Vorbis is used in the Xbox 360.

Google has pretty much been fence sitting on the whole matter, given that they advocate H.264 through YouTube, while not actively dissuading Theora usage. Additionally, Chrome is currently using the ffmpeg engine to support <audio> and <video>.

One way that Silverlight could actually best Flash would be if Silverlight was made into a usable fallback engine for <video> and <audio> as supported by Mozilla Firefox. Of course, I doubt we will see it anytime soon. Maybe in Moonlight, when it gets ported back to Windows.

Flash and Silverlight, in their current states, are rather unreliable in the browser. Plus, they kinda bypass the browser security model, given that they are both plugins. The only possible exception to the rule would be Chrome, since it isolates plugins in a separate process, but I don't completely understand how that works, so meh....

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

In reply to magicalclick

#Jul 6th @ 6:01 PM

The entire point of <video> and <audio> is to make things that people often use Flash or Silverlight for possible WITHOUT Flash and Silverlight. Smiley "Why not use Flash or Silverlight?" is missing the point. Which is that the future of the Internet is too important to be in the hands of one organization.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Jul 6th @ 4:00 PM

I think the point of the <video> isn't to replace Flash/Silverlight/whatever...it's to have a "base" way of putting videos up...so my 8 year old can make HTML pages,put up some silly videos...

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

In reply to W3bbo

#Jul 6th @ 4:23 PM

"None of the Silverlight players I've used have an active scrubber, whereas youtube's Flash player does."

What do you mean by "active scrubber"? How is it different from the scrubber on c9 videos for example? tia

CreamFilling512

In reply to magicalclick

#Jul 6th @ 6:01 PM

Why can't they do what Silverlight does and support EVERY codec? Or leverage the video codec capabilities that are built into the operating system?

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to Bass

#Jul 6th @ 6:12 PM

...so we put it in the hands of the W3C. Because as we all know, they've been doing a great job so far. Web standards aren't an unwieldy mess at all, and thanks to the W3C progress on the web is speeding along.

LeoDavidson

In reply to CannotResolveSymbol

#Jul 6th @ 4:24 PM

Another nice thing about <video> is you can right-click the thing and get options to save it to disk, copy the URL to the video file, or open just the video file by itself.

You know, the things you can do with most other content on the web except for all the video plugins which go out of their way to make it difficult for the user (until certain Firefox extensions came along Smiley ).

It's for that reason that I might start using <video> on my own pages. (With Flash as a fallback, and the iPhone can probably go **** itself if it can't do one or the other due to Apple's control freakery around the idea that, gasp, people mgiht be able to run unsanctioned interactive content via Flash on their phones! It's ridiculous that YouTube, the BBC, etc. all had to make special versions of their site for one device. That's backwards. If a device comes along that purposefully cannot play standard* content then you let the device suffer, not bend over backwards to support it. Everyone's so in love with Apple that they can't see the truth to do the right thing, though!)

(*Where standard means "what everyone else uses" rather than what is in a W3C standard. i.e. Flash is currently the standard way to put video on the web.)

Another reason I might use <video> is that it isn't affected by Flashblock or NoScript. (Someone might bring out a Videoblock for people who want it, but the people who use that will be a subset of those who block Flash etc. for other reasons. e.g. I block Flash by default, except for a whitelist, due to poorly designed Flash ads on some sites which use 100% of a CPU core.)