Hi,
I've heard that wikipedia will be among the first content providers to support the video and audio tags in html5. I'm trying to put up a presentation about the subject for a FF3.5 release party and I would like to find out more. Could you point me to some documents or answer some of the questions below?
1) When will this support appear? 2) Has the code already been modified accordingly? 3) How much time will legacy browsers be supported? 4) What prompted this desire to be an early adopter of this technology? 5) Will other codecs except Theora be supported?
I know some of these questions have already been answered, either here or on the techblog (which BTW is currently down), but I thought putting them all toghether would make more sense.
Thanks, Andrei Cipu [aka Strainu]
On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Strainustrainu10@gmail.com wrote:
- When will this support appear?
- Has the code already been modified accordingly?
The Wikimedia sites all have the OggHandler extension installed, which supports a number of different methods for playing audio and video, including the <audio> and <video> tags:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OggHandler
A button is displayed (along with a thumbnail for video), which runs some javascript when clicked to detect a method to play the media. If the user's browser supports the <audio> and <video> tags, they will be used. Otherwise, the script steps through various browser plugin media players (starting with the Cortado Java applet) until it finds one that works, or if there is none, directs the user to where they can download one.
I'm using FF 3.5 and video playback works very nicely, using the <video> tags.
- How much time will legacy browsers be supported?
As long as the OggHandler extension is used, playback will try to devolve gracefully.
On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 4:39 AM, Strainustrainu10@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I've heard that wikipedia will be among the first content providers to support the video and audio tags in html5. I'm trying to put up a presentation about the subject for a FF3.5 release party and I would like to find out more. Could you point me to some documents or answer some of the questions below?
- When will this support appear?
- Has the code already been modified accordingly?
Stephen Bain addressed this admirably, but I thought I should add that the support has been there for years now. We've been waiting browser vendors to catch up.
Even prior to Opera's push for the video tag we had in-browser java based playback of Ogg files on English Wikipedia.
- How much time will legacy browsers be supported?
For Wikimedia legacy browser support is fairly inexpensive: They play back the same files that the video/audio users. So legacy support can last as long as its relevant.
For sites who have used other formats for legacy browsers, they have the cost of maintaining another set of encodes and format royalties, so for them there may be more incentive to drop legacy support.
There is also a question of what constitutes 'legacy': There is one desktop browser can play our video perfectly adequately using the HTML5 tags, but it requires a codec pack.
- What prompted this desire to be an early adopter of this technology?
Wikimedia has a long-standing commitment to open and unencumbered file formats which stems back to nearly the start of the projects. The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally", and it has been the belief that people are more empowered when they don't feel forced for compatibility reasons to use formats they have to ask permission for and pay for.
As such, the use of encumbered video technology such as flash is not something that would be decided lightly.
The adoption of the HTML5 tags follows naturally from this pre-existing behavior as a way of getting media working for a larger portion of the userbase.
- Will other codecs except Theora be supported?
The list of file types supported today can be found here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_types
Really the support just depends on the intersection of the project requirements (as of today: free and unencumbered formats) and client support (as of today, Ogg/Theora has the widest client compatibility for HTML5 video).
The thumbnailing infrastructure for video currently only handles Ogg/Theora but other formats could be easily added.
This one isn't really a technical question.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org