video Archives - Broken Links Archive

The Media Fragments Module

One W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tion which seems to have slipped below most peo­ple’s radar is Media Frag­ments 1.0, which moved to Can­di­date Rec­om­men­da­tion sta­tus in Decem­ber last year. Media Frag­ments is a syn­tax which extends the URLs of media files so that only select­ed por­tions are made avail­able to the user; let me explain that fur­ther with a cou­ple of examples.

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Playing WebM in Safari with plugins

As you’re no doubt aware, HTML5 video is this year’s big thing — but there’s a dis­pute going on about which should become the default stan­dard video codec. The cur­rent nascent de fac­to stan­dard is H.264, but recent­ly the new WebM for­mat is gain­ing traction.

I’ve no idea how the web video for­mat war will end. My pref­er­ence is that a free, non-patent encum­bered, high-qual­i­ty video codec will become the stan­dard, and WebM is the best fit for that descrip­tion. Despite the recent announce­ment by the MPEG LA, the patent pool which con­trols licens­ing of H.264, that it will always be free for ‘video deliv­ered to the inter­net with­out charge’, that still does­n’t make it free-as-in-speech, and still not free-as-in-beer for any­one want­i­ng to build a busi­ness around video encoding/decoding (which includes, if I’m not mis­tak­en, bundling it with a brows­er). All that said, my pref­er­ence is mean­ing­less in the face of so many vest­ed busi­ness interests.

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Encoding Video for Android

In my pre­vi­ous post, Mak­ing HTML5 Video work on Android phones, I said that you have to encode your videos as .m4v in order for them to work in Android. This isn’t actu­al­ly cor­rect. The suf­fix can be either .mp4 or .m4v, what mat­ters is the way the video is encoded.

Now, there are loads of blog and forum posts which give dif­fer­ing advice on pre­sets and para­me­ters, and I’m no expert — so what I’ll do is just show you two quick ways that worked for me (I have a Sam­sung Galaxy S).

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Making HTML5 Video work on Android phones

I recent­ly became the own­er of an Android phone* and found that, despite it being list­ed as a fea­ture of the brows­er, the HTML5 video ele­ment did­n’t work for almost all of the exam­ples I tried. I’ve just done some exper­i­men­ta­tion with this and think I’ve found a solu­tion, so this post is offered in the hope that it helps any­one who may be tear­ing their hair out over the same problem.

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Building a better HTML5 video player with Glow

Last year I wrote a post (Build­ing HTML5 video con­trols with JavaScript) intro­duc­ing the HTML5 Media Ele­ments API and demon­strat­ing a sim­ple set of con­trols for play­ing video.

In this (some­what belat­ed) fol­low-up I’m going to explore build­ing a more inter­ac­tive set of con­trols using a JavaScript UI library; I’m going to use Glow, but it could eas­i­ly be adapt­ed to jQuery UI or similar.

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Building HTML5 video controls with JavaScript

The HTML5 video ele­ment is now includ­ed in Fire­fox, Safari & Chrome, and on its way in Opera. By using JavaScript to access the media ele­ments API it’s easy to build your own cus­tom con­trols for it; in this arti­cle I’m going to show how I built a (very) basic con­trol interface.

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Aside

I’ve updat­ed my Speak­ing page to include more con­fer­ences, more videos, and a lit­tle on my speak­ing require­ments and pref­er­ences. I’m plan­ning to cut down on the num­ber of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to inter­est­ing offers and oppor­tu­ni­ties, so please get in touch if you’re organ­is­ing an event.

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