TL;DR SUMMARY: check out this short, silent, black & white video: https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ -- anybody interested in a side project on in-browser audio/video decoding fallback? One of my pet peeves is that we don't have audio/video playback on many systems, including default Windows and Mac desktops and non-Android mobile devices, which don't ship with Theora or WebM video decoding. The technically simplest way to handle this is to transcode videos into H.264 (.mp4 files) which is well supported by the troublesome browsers. Unfortunately there are concerns about the patent licensing, which has held us up from deploying any H.264 output options though all the software is ready to go... While I still hope we'll get that resolved eventually, there is an alternative -- client-side software decoding. We have used the 'Cortado <http://www.theora.org/cortado/>' Java applet to do fallback software decoding in the browser for a few years, but Java applets are aggressively being deprecated on today's web: * no Java applets at all on major mobile browsers * Java usually requires a manual install on desktop * Java applets disabled by default for security on major desktop browsers Luckily, JavaScript engines have gotten *really fast* in the last few years, and performance is getting well in line with what Java applets can do. As an experiment, I've built Xiph's ogg, vorbis, and theora C libraries cross-compiled to JavaScript using emscripten<https://github.com/kripken/emscripten>and written a wrapper that decodes Theora video from an .ogv stream and draws the frames into a <canvas> element: * demo: https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ * code: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js * blog & some details: https://brionv.com/log/2013/10/06/ogv-js-proof-of-concept/ It's just a proof of concept -- the colorspace conversion is incomplete so it's grayscale, there's no audio or proper framerate sync, and it doesn't really stream data properly. But I'm pleased it works so far! (Currently it breaks in IE, but I think I can fix that at least for 10/11, possibly for 9. Probably not for 6/7/8.) Performance on iOS devices isn't great, but is better with lower resolution files :) On desktop it's screaming fast for moderate resolutions, and could probably supplement or replace Cortado with further development. Is anyone interested in helping out or picking up the project to move it towards proper playback? If not, it'll be one of my weekend "fun" projects I occasionally tinker with off the clock. :) -- brion