blog/data/2009-01-17-html5-video.txt

   1 Title: When web browser developers make a video player...
   2 Tags: english, nuug, video, web, multimedia, h264
   3 Date: 2009-01-17 18:50
   4
   5 <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
   6 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
   7 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
   8 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
   9 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
  10 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
  11 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
  12 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
  13 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
  14 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
  15 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
  16 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
  17 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
  18 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
  19
  20 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
  21 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
  22 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
  23 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
  24 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
  25 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
  26 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
  27 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
  28 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
  29 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
  30 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
  31 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
  32 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
  33 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
  34 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
  35 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
  36 playing when the download is done.</p>
  37
  38 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
  39 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
  40 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
  41 too.</p>
  42
  43 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
  44 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
  45 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
  46 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>