Flash alternatives

[Justin Dugger]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 1:32 PM,  <billycrook at gmail.com> 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