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Use html5 video tags in html with flash fallback for old browsers

code.google.com

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Today is the first day in the rest of Flashs' life.

When do we start making games using HTML5? Or did you mean Flash video? Because Flash does more than just play videos.

http://purplefloyd.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/a-platform-game-...

http://www.kevs3d.co.uk/dev/asteroids/

This is not really complete, but still impressive what you can do: http://www.megidish.net/awjs/

I don't know & I don't care. IMHO video is the killer-app that made Flash a must-have everywhere. When it's down to games, Flash is a nice-to-have like Shockwave ended up being.

http://www.freeciv.net/

Oh SHIT. That game alone makes the case for HTML5 as far as I'm concerned. It may not be the most technically advanced HTML5 game I've seen (or is it?), but it's actually the kind of UI I'd want to use and that's more important than technical sophistication and fancy complex algorithms.

My life is over.

WARNING: Do not click unless you don't have anything better to do... I think I lost a month of my life to freeciv.

Until browsers stop sandboxing developers, there will always be a need for plugins. As some dude from the silverlight department said (paraphrase) "plugins will always move faster than a standards committee."

What with firefox's reluctance to agree with h264, you can see that the standards can take time. Plugins are a way for users to decide the features they want, faster.

Plugins ain't dead yet. If you think about it, how long did it take for HTML to catch up with flash? Flash has the potential to extend web capabilities further.

Works with HTML5 video on Firefox 3.6 but Fail with IE7 (the flash load but the video can't be played).

I'm afraid it works just fine on my IE7 test machine. If you have more information, please submit a bug on the project site and I'll look into it. :)

http://code.google.com/p/html5media/issues/list

I don't see any video in firefox 2.0.0.13 at http://static.etianen.com/html5media/

If this is the same issue as was occurring in Firefox 3.0, then it has now been fixed.

I appreciate the software and I think it's cool.

But really guys? I need jQuery to do this? You really couldn't write it without jQuery?

Even the simplest of things requires jQuery now. It's just not cool without 100kb of JS behind it.

I will confess, the though of doing it without jQuery never actually occurred to me. It's pretty much become synonymous with Javascript in my head.

I'll give some thought to a jquery-less solution.

It is a very cool idea. But I'm so tired of downloading jquery a hundred times per page. I'm also frustrated that jquery is so difficult to pull apart into a minimal set of components.

If there is one thing jQuery could eagerly copy from Mootools, it should be that ability to decompose the library into a minimal set. Then using it wouldn't be a problem.

Requires javascript to be enabled - so not a complete catch all for a small minority (still cool though)

It looks like it only needs javascript for the flash fallback, and it wouldn't be too hard to put something in the video tag that would work as fallback for those without either html5 video or javascript.

I think the only reason they didn't show this is because it's extra complexity for something that many people don't care about. For those that do care there's Kroc Camen's "Video for Everybody"

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

As a side, I was struck by the really nice use of the css property 'text-shadow' on that site.

Practically speaking, JavaScript is already a requirement to get Flash embedding to work correctly across all browsers without the headache -- hence tools like SWFObject, flashembed.js, etc.

That's mostly because of IE's fault wrapping security thing around normally embedded flash.

I wonder how many people watch video in their browser and disable JavaScript. That certainly seems likely to be a tiny minority to me.

how can i use html5 video tags with youtube videos? that is, there are youtube videos i want to display using video tags rather than an embedded flash object. is it possible to find the mp4 URI?

opt into Youtube HTML5 beta.

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Visit a video page. Right click on the video and "inspect element" (assuming your in Chrome) and it will show a url in the <video > tag. (Note view source wont work as it appears to be loaded using JS)

You could probably automate this process if needed.

Also: im not sure if the URL is time sensitive or not.

Trouble is, one still has to encode one's video in 3 formats; h264, ogg/thora, and flv for the fallback.

That ain't progress my friends.

But at the very least there is one simple client side mechanism for doing all this, you just worry about the encoding and you let google worry about rendering it. It is good progress. We just need about an inch or two more till we hit the finish line though.

As far as I understand from the page:

You only need to include one format - h264. If you then view it with a browser that doesn't support VIDEO, or does support VIDEO but not h264 (firefox), it'll fallback to playing that h264 using flash (No flv required as far as I see).

However, you can also give firefox some love by adding an ogg version.

So IMHO, this is real tangible useful progress. It makes it easier for developers to use cool new HTML5 features without breaking old crappy browsers.

Yes, because I definitely want to embed a tag that tells google exactly when anybody accesses my page. Don't they have enough data on us already?

Or instead of getting all frothed up over nothing, you could host the files yourself.

This project isn't a product of Google, it's simply hosted at Google Code.

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