Aren't they banging open doors? HTML5 video and audio is great and with WebAudio and WebGL you can manipulate every aspect of the experience. EQ, filters are possible. What else do you need? Subtitles?
I just don't understand what problem are they trying to solve because "I can't run VLC in the browser" certainly isn't one.
"And completing this thought, by choosing something like VLC, with its top-down open source condition and universal approach, the “closing of the loop” from VLC being available in all browsers instantly will ideally cause people to find the time to improve and add formats that otherwise wouldn’t experience such advocacy. Images into Apple II floppy disk image? Oscilloscope captures? Morse code evaluation? Slow Scan Television? If those items have a future, it’s probably in VLC and it’s much more likely if the web uses a VLC that just appears in the browser, no fuss or muss."
This makes a lot of sense for the internet archive. There are many "lets do it in js because we can" projects, this is not one of those.
Remember that this is the Internet Archive - they have huge quantities of content that they're seeking to make more accessible by making it one-click playable in the browser. It's worked out brilliantly for disk images from the 8-bit computer era, and I expect this new project will work out even more so.
He hopes having that capability in the browser will inspire people to add even more obscure formats to VLC. So it's a virtous cycle.
In theory it would also enable browsers to support 'wierd' new formats like BPG [1], FLIF [2] and Lepton [3] which are never going to get widespread support or any support at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Portable_Graphics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Image_Format
[3] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/lepton-image-compress...
The author works for the Internet Archive and it obviously has a huge amount of files in a variety of formats that are not playable natively by browsers, and probably never will be.
But playing a DVD, for example, isn't just about codecs, they have menus and various other features that need to be implemented too.
But this would mean support for an incredible number of input formats.
At least that is how I understand their goals.
I'm mostly guessing.
I wonder how heavy different encodings/formats will be to decode in JS. Haven't worked with video on that level of detail, but I imagine that there a plenty of optimizations that can be done in low-level languages to get solid performance that JS might not deliver.
VLC also might be "more robust" (in terms of accomodating for file corruption) than your browsers' player, might provide a more "stable" experience cross browsers, or allow things like "convert that video file for me in the browser to images and show me those instead" etc. FWIW.
Doing this natively in JS via canvas allows you exactly that - rendering these things natively, in real time, with all the support for rare features you could ever need.
Also, here's a fun quirk of the subtitles track element: you cannot remove a track once added.
Another obstacle for full FCC compliance: styling. You must allow users to style your captions. Captions are put in the shadow DOM - Firefox does not allow you to style the shadow dom.
Don't forget to add IE into the mix!