On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 10:57 PM, Nitesh Mistry <mail...@mistrynitesh.net> wrote: ><snip /> > > Ramnarayan made a very good suggestion. You could provide links to both > the formats - with may be a teaser like "Your software does not support > open standards? Click here for .doc file". As for the video, all the > major browsers a fast adopting html5 standards (except the obvious ones) > which supports <video> tag and link to .ogv files. > Ah .. how I wish this were true .. sorry to go a bit off-topic, but this is also a bit of a vent on the issue of cross-browser <video> support. So, all browsers (except the obvious one :P) now support the <video> tag. The problem is they don't all support the same video codecs inside the <video> tag. And even worse, some have weirdo bugs with their implementations.
So: Firefox supports <video> with Ogg Theora but not h264 (because it demands a license). Safari supports <video> with only h264 out of the box (the xiph-qt plugin for quicktime can be installed to support ogg theora). Google Chrome supports <video> with both h264 and ogg theora, BUT, they have a bug with their implementation which causes it not to work for live streams or any audio or video content without a correct content-length header. Opera supports theora and not h264. IE9 has said it will support <video>, but of course will not support Ogg Theora. So they will support h264 and *maybe* WebM. Newer builds of firefox, safari, opera and chrome all support WebM (http://www.webmproject.org/), and Adobe has announced they will have WebM support in an upcoming version of flash. Safari has some weirdo implementation that may not allow client-side seeking using http-range requests of WebM video, which sucks. So, WebM may make the situation a bit better, but probably is impractical to use right now. Right now, it is very sweet to link to an ogg version of the video and possibly even use the <video> tag (you can easily encode to Ogg using the firefox plugin Firefogg - http://firefogg.org ). You can use some JS libraries to fallback to Java in case the browser does not support <video>, like the mv_embed wikimedia project, but Java in the browser tends to be a sucky user experience. All in all, if you want to support all browsers and don't want to tear all your hair out, and don't want to encode to multiple formats, you're still stuck with flash :(. Sorry for the off-topic rant, just wanted to clarify the cross-browser situation with <video> and the open source ogg theora codec .. *bangs head against wall* -Sanjay -- ubuntu-in mailing list ubuntu-in@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-in
