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The core mp3 player, however, is in actionscript.

OH darn I thought it was all via jscript. Was excited for media streaming in iPhone browser if that was the case.

Maybe some form of jscript module soon will be robust enough to natively play audio files!

Don't see how that's possible without the OS exposing some kind of API, or if the browser latches on to that API. Either way, there is no portability here. Your best bet is Java, not JavaScript, or maybe just plain ol' Flash.

Could javascript convert an mp3 to a wav that any browser can play on the fly? I'm sure someone could make that.

The question is speed.

Given how awesome it would be for music sites on the iphone and other flashless mobile browsers, I'd love to see sometime try.

here's the answer:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#the-video-element http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#the-audio-element

... but with the exception of IE (unless someone write some kind of activex to support it)

I'm sure it would be relatively trivial to make an activex plugin to support <video> and <audio>. The trick is getting the IE drones to actually install it... most of them are still using IE6, which is now 2 versions behind as of a few weeks ago.

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