Simon Willison’s Weblog

HTML 5 audio player demo. Scott Andrew’s experiments with the HTML5 audio element (and jQuery)—straight forward and works a treat in Safari, but Firefox doesn’t support MP3. Presumably it’s not too hard to set up a fallback for Ogg.

# 1st February 2010, 9:58 am / audio, firefox, html5, javascript, jquery, mp3, ogg, safari, scott-andrew

Video for Everybody! Reminiscent of the early days of Web Standards, Kroc Camen has created a fiendishly clever chunk of HTML which can play a video on any browser, starting with HTML5 video then falling back on Flash and eventually just an HTML message telling the user where they can download the file. No JavaScript to be seen, but conditional comments abound. Requires you to encode as both Ogg and H.264, but Kroc includes details instructions for doing that using Handbrake.

# 2nd July 2009, 7:33 pm / codecs, encoding, h264, hacks, handbrake, html, html5, kroccamen, ogg, video

Codecs for <audio> and <video>. HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support H.264 due to the cost of the licenses.

# 2nd July 2009, 10:16 am / audio, chromium, codecs, google, h264, html5, ian-hickson, mozilla, ogg, patents, theora, video