How many formats do I need for HTML5 video? | Hacker News Reader

How many formats do I need for HTML5 video?

zencoder.com

72 pointsjon_dahl22 comments

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I consider the HTML5 bible to be Mark Pilgrim's work-in-progress Dive Into HTML5 book, which is available online.

The part of the book that specifically covers this is:

http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works

It's a great book with frequent updates and it covers everything, including local storage.

I recently started doing some tech-related screencasts for our clients (photographers) at http://bigfolio.tv.

I wanted it to be all HTML5 and I'm still experimenting. I ended up doing 3 H.264 versions (a large .mov and a large/small .m4v) and an Ogg file. Just to be safe, I put a couple download links for people.

I haven't had any complaints but I did notice that older version of iOS can't play it. Haven't really tested Android.

Getting them all converted and put on S3 is quite a PITA. Another thing I discovered–if you're putting Ogg files on S3, you have to make sure to set the mime-type or FireFox won't play it.

.mov will only play in the Safaris, not even Chrome.

Better to use a .mp4 and .ogv (or webm) if you're want to go pure HTML5 and have the best results across browsers. The mobile browsers have additional restrictions.

Just ran into the mobile issue with file bitrates being too high. There are a lot of "gotchas" when doing html5 videos, but not too many that would scare you away from using it, you just need to test for a lot of cases.

If I were doing this today, I would choose just x264. Deliver it via the video tag, with flash as the fallback for firefox.

Too many.

Two is too many, I agree, but it will almost surely be 1 in the next coming months (assuming Microsoft supports WebM + VP8)

Are you choosing to ignore iPhone/iPad/OSX or is there something I'm missing?

Will Apple choose to ignore WebM and VP8?

Yes.

While I find the parent overly optimistic (the day IE9 ships WebM is the day that I take a flight on Hog Airlines), I think this is also missing the point.

Hypothetically were IE to ship with WebM support, Apple doesn't have the market share to enforce their current codec monoculture. The converse is not true however; Microsoft doesn't care if Safari/iOS can play WebM. The onus is thus on the IE team, and I think Apple is irrelevant to the issue.

I have clients ask for videos that work on the iPad and iPhone, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

No, it's not; video is complicated, and it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side than to expect every client to be able to a) play back any arbitrary bitstream or b) transcode on the fly. In a ideal world, we'd all be serving up 10-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV and your computer would be able to handle it (to say nothing of your phone); but until that happy day of unlimited bandwidth and free cycles, multiple bitstreams is hardly an onerous cost to pay.

That depends on your perspective. If you're producing and serving one ready-made video at a time, say for a video tutorial, maybe converting to multiple formats isn't much of a burden. If you're rendering videos, say for raytracing demos, and they take a lot of processing power to render and you have many of them, it's a significant burden to recode all of them multiple ways. Given that there is one way that is already well established and works reliably almost everywhere -- Flash -- I don't have much sympathy for HTML5 advocates who can't offer a solution that isn't at least as easy and customisable as what we've had for years already, nor for a certain brand of hardware that makes a point of not playing by the same rules as everyone else in the game.

I don't know what you mean by "customizable", but the easy solution is to just use Baseline H.264 with a modest bit rate. It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. Ogg is unnecessary, because everything that doesn't support H.264 natively supports Flash.

> It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else.

H.264 seems to be the most widely supported format today, if you don't get screwed by the whole patent mess. A significant class of users do, though, if only because they use OSS browsers that are never likely to support a royalty-encumbered format. And of course, if you're distributing H.264 videos you probably need a lawyer one way or another.

As for customisation, Flash offers all kinds of possibilities that HTML5 video just doesn't, from custom controls to copy protection. Some people might not care, but they're probably the same ones who object to table-based layout and then expect you to write 20 lines of CSS and import three different IE-specific stylesheets just to get a trivial layout. Check out past comments from people who work at places like Google/YouTube.

> it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side

ah, that brings back good old memories. We used to prepare at least three formats for WMP, Realplayer and Quicktime. AFAIK HTML5 isn't doing anything better.

Is there a simple way to do live streaming with WebM yet?

No recommendation on the multiple bitrate settings? Anybody?

which of those formats can ffmpeg convert to?

All.

but keep in mind all converts are lossy.

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