Simon Willison’s Weblog

Video on the Web—Dive Into HTML5. Everything a web developer needs to know about video containers, video codecs, adio containers, audio codecs, h.264, theora, vorbis, licensing, encoding, batch encoding and the html5 video element.

# 24th March 2010, 12:50 am / theora, h264, video, audio, html5, mark-pilgrim

Video for Everybody! Reminiscent of the early days of Web Standards, Kroc Camen has created a fiendishly clever chunk of HTML which can play a video on any browser, starting with HTML5 video then falling back on Flash and eventually just an HTML message telling the user where they can download the file. No JavaScript to be seen, but conditional comments abound. Requires you to encode as both Ogg and H.264, but Kroc includes details instructions for doing that using Handbrake.

# 2nd July 2009, 7:33 pm / html5, video, kroccamen, html, hacks, encoding, codecs, handbrake, ogg, h264

Codecs for <audio> and <video>. HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support H.264 due to the cost of the licenses.

# 2nd July 2009, 10:16 am / h264, video, audio, html5, ian-hickson, theora, ogg, chromium, mozilla, google, patents, codecs

H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone.

# 21st August 2007, 8:28 am / flash, h264, silverlight, iphone, youtube, video, adobe, microsoft, appletv