Ticket #237 (assigned enhancement)
Support for HTML5 video tag
| Reported by: | vik | Owned by: | baiju |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | minor | Milestone: | 4.1 |
| Component: | EmbeddedPlayback | Keywords: | |
| Cc: | Who will test this: | And |
Description
Modern browsers are now natively supporting the embedding of video using the <video> tag. Unfortunately the original plan to use ogg/theora for this was dropped, and a number of formats are now acceptable, depending on the browser and OS. E.g. Firefox 3.5 only supports ogg, Safari 4 supports h.264 (possibly others?), Chrome supports everything (ships with ffmpeg). IE8 doesn't support the video tag at all, future IEs are probably unlikely to. Which leaves a slightly messy situation, with two approaches: 1) In javascript, determine the browser's video and codec capabilities, and write HTML pointing to the appropriate source (ogv, mp4, or fallback to flv) 2) Use the html5 'source' attribute to specify multiple possibilities, and let the browser decide which one it can use.
In both cases, at least two video formats will be needed on the server: ogv and (probably) mpeg4. Transcoding will need to handle make both of these.
Also in both cases, a fallback will be required. This can either be flash video or cortado. Cortado is nice in that it can use the existing ogg stream to play the video, and is open. Flash is nice in that most browsers have it (citation needed? What is the uptake of java vs flash?), but would need a third video stream on the server (and is not open). The fallback should be relatively easy to implement in the second case by including an object tag inside the video tag - this will be ignored by browsers supporting the video tag, but used by browsers not supporting it. Will need to do some research about cortado/java vs flowplayer/flash, including bandwidth and CPU issues.
