David Gerard wrote:
On 11/01/2008, Tim Starling tstarling@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