Apple.com now uses the HTML5 video tag | Hacker News Reader

Apple.com now uses the HTML5 video tag

ajaxian.com

56 pointsedd15 comments

I saw this yesterday after their product launches and had to take a look at the source. I'm actually really excited about this.

In Apple style they really made the presentation awesome. I had to do a double take because the video looked as if it was playing in Quicktime X within the browser.

Does anyone have a link to any example? There is none in the article and all the videos I can find on the Apple.com site are Quicktime videos.

http://www.apple.com/magicmouse/ (scroll down)

I get a "download quicktime" message and a link to the QuickTime download for "Mac and PC". Then on the download page the options are OSX Tiger or Leopard (or later; http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/) ... no link for other platforms. No mention of Linux.

I'll bet by PC they mean MS Windows anyway?

Rubbish.

Same here, even though I'm using Chromium on Linux with the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree package installed (so it should support all HTML5 video formats that Safari does).

There don't seem to be any VIDEO elements on the page, so I guess they're only sending them to a limited set of "supported" browsers.

I see it in Chrome, but not in FF3.5.

Browser detection.

No, that's incorrect.

It's related to the format of the video rather than browser sniffing. Firefox only supports Ogg Theora for HTML5 video, but the video on the page is MP4/H.264. Dive Into HTML5 has more detail: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works

I'm pretty sure it is using some form of browser detection. In Safari I get a <video> element, and in Firefox, I get an <object> with an <embed>.

Wouldn't it be nice if it let me use VLC which supports damn-near everything?

Mozilla is fundamentally opposed to decency on ideological grounds.

They really should just do a generalized version of what Safari does -- call out to Quicktime / DirectShow / GStreamer, but they'll never do that, because it would invalidate their efforts to shove OGG down people's throats.

Barring that, they should do what Chrome does -- link in a normal copy of ffmpeg that's built without most of the codecs by default.

Instead, they link directly with liboggplay. You'd have to significantly fork Gecko in order to support anything but Vorbis and Theora in OGG containers. It reminds me of the way Stallman designed GCC's internal representations to be impossible to interface with externally.

If you're going to wank about respecting patents and copyright licenses, let them be enforced by the legal system -- don't do it by writing obnoxious code.

I've never been a big fan of Apple's mouses... but this looks pretty sweet

Thanks!

There's a video link on the front page to: http://www.apple.com/imac/the-new-imac/

The video provided is MP4/H264 so it'll only work under Safari (maybe Chrome?) with the <video> tag. Firefox will use the Quicktime plugin.

I actually saw this yesterday when I was trying to download the video for later watching when I was offline. It surprised me a little to see it on a production website, but I was thrilled to see it. It even has that "Quicktime X" look in Leopard, too.

Yet they also have odd junk like this in their page:

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