On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 1:32 PM, [email protected] wrote:
The <video> tag *specifically was* conceived to render video without proprietary plugins.
Actually, it wasn't conceived to render without proprietary plugins (this would basically be impossible, or at least very stupid). It was conceived to standardize video and make it a first class citizen of the web. The benefit of this is that you can link to a clip of a video, rather than the whole thing, and let the web do content analysis for you the way Google pagerank does. This will make video *searchable*, and is a huge improvement. Proprietary codecs and delivery is secondary to this.
Making <video> solely about the end of WMA, AAC and quicktime makes you a free man in an empty kingdom. I applaud Mozilla's plan to make Ogg Theora a universally supported format though. It's the first prerequisite to a standard that codifies existing practice. Not sure it will fly with MMS messages though. See Nokia's position paper on reasons why not.
Here is a video of some of the magic this makes possible: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/video_svg_demo.ogg
And demo video playback in your browser by visiting this url in it: http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/demos/arctic_giant.html
Neat. I had been wondering where relevant test pages were.
For some reason, that demo site appeared to work properly on my machine which is not yet using FF3.1 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1)
The actual tag that corresponds to the video is: <video src="arctic_giant.ogg" width="512" height="385" controls="true"></video>
So I guess it is also already supported in FireFox.
It appears to be supported on my box by the "inferior" cortendo plugin, which is a Java applet, with all the same technical drawbacks of flash rendering. I'll try it out on my Ubuntu 8.10 box soon enough and see how it differs.
Justin Dugger