David Gerard wrote:
On 11/01/2008, Tim Starling
<tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
> If/when do Wikimedia sites plan to start
using the HTML5 <VIDEO>
> element to serve up Ogg Theora? (Is there similar for Ogg Vorbis?)
> Soon? Release of Firefox 3? Whenever? If someone's using Safari or a
> Nokia, will it suggest their experience will suck less with a real web
> browser? What's the plan?
We do already, if the client supports it and no
other video playing method
is available. I couldn't put it any higher in the preference list in good
conscience, since the only available implementation (Opera's demo) was
incomplete and buggy.
ahahaha :-) I've checked how it's going in Firefox 3:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382267
The WHATWG spec is reasonably solid now, so there's something stable
for them to program against. *Cross fingers* it's ready in good shape
for Firefox 3 release.
(I've been using Minefield, the Firefox 3 nightlies. Some builds are
crappy, but in general it's really pretty nice. Feels like Firefox but
with a lot of little slicknesses added. I like it a lot.)
To be honest, I'm not particularly excited about the prospect. The idea of
<video> is to avoid writing complicated client detection and embedding
code for lots of different players. But it's too late, I've already
written it. Maybe when all the browsers support <video>, we'll be able to
retire it. But judging by the opinion of Chris Wilson, who I spoke to at a
conference last year, Internet Explorer is only likely to get built-in
Theora support in about 15 years' time, once the potential for submarine
patents has lapsed. So it looks like OggPlayer.js has a long life ahead of it.
In the meantime <video> will just be a collection of extra players (one
per browser), each with its own set of bugs. I'd like to see some more
development effort go into Cortado, which despite its foibles is at least
reasonably consistent across platforms.
-- Tim Starling