Flash alternatives

[billycrook at gmail.com]

On 2008-09-09, Nathan Cerny <ncerny at gmail.com> wrote:
> You still need a renderer to display the video - whether you embed a java
> object, a flash object, a Windows Media Player object, etc...you're still
> going to leave out a segment of the crowd.  No matter what method you chose
> you're still using a proprietary plugin - you just have to choose the one
> you think the most people will have.  I think that's flash.
> The video tag is new in the HTML 5.0 standard - a standard that is still
> being drafted, and not supported in any modern browser yet.  The current
> generation of browsers (Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, IE 8, etc) have limited
> support of the draft, but from what I'm seeing the video tag isn't included
> in their support.

The <video> tag *specifically was* conceived to render video without
proprietary plugins.  Aside from being bad from their license alone,
proprietary video playback plugins are also technologically inferior,
and video rendering exemplifies that.  Even Free video playback
plugins are inferior to native rendering for performance reasons.

With <video> the browser itself will render video, like it does pngs,
and text.  Another great advantage is the video playback is exposed
via the DOM, and can be CSS-ified, and interacted with dynamically
using javascript.

Here is a video of some of the magic this makes possible:
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/video_svg_demo.ogg

You can download Firefox 3.1, Alpha 1 from:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=shiretoko-alpha1&os=linux&lang=en-US

And demo video playback in your browser by visiting this url in it:
http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/demos/arctic_giant.html

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.