HTML 5 is the one of the current buzz words in the web design world and is set to become the standard that all our web browsers work to in the future.
In this article we will be looking at HTML 5 support for playing video. HTML 5 contains a ‘video’ tag which allows developers to embed a video player into their pages with a single line of code. This means that playing videos will be handled by the browser not by third party plugins.
HTML 5 video is already now being supported in the new generation of browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE9.
Flash Player has done a stand up job for the last 5 years as the video player technology of choice, filling a gap and providing a cross-platform solution for delivering video. But with HTML 5 the browsers will take over this core functionality. For many users Flash will continue to be required for playing video for a long time to come, until everyone is on next gen browsers, but this transition is starting now. HTML 5 video will be supported in all the next generation browsers and, as web designers, we have to start adapting to it now.
Apple have publicly announced that they will not support Flash on their mobile browsers which has a high impact when you take into account that Apple owns 25% of a mobile browser market which is due for huge expansion over the next few years. We will therefore be recommending that we should start delivering video in our websites through HTML 5 in addition to the current Flash video format for people on older browsers. This is quite a quick adaptation and a few lines of HTML 5 code and a quick JavaScript check can can immediately make our videos play on Apple mobile devices.
The next chapter of the story is video formats. Which is a whole other issue. There are currently 3 key formats of video emerging which are supported natively in the next-gen browsers:
H.264 – The only video format supported by Apple devices (proprietary format, with potential royalties to be paid for it’s use)
OGV – Ogg Vorbis video is the only format supported by Opera (and Chrome I believe). This is an open source and free format.
VP8 – Supported only on IE9 (which also supports H.264)
This means that we will have to be encoding all our videos in both H.264 and OGV formats for the foreseeable future, in order to support all browsers. This sounds a little bit like a return to the dark ages of WMV, QT and Real, but at least we will not be having to deal with multiple third party plugins. Our encoding machines will be working overtime though!
There is another issue here. The most highly rated modern streaming video is encoded in H.264 codec and wrapped in an MP4 wrapper. With many sites hosting thousands of these videos.
H.264 is not an open or free technology. Each video which we encode and publish in H.264 should have a royalty payed to the owners of the technology (MPEG LA group which includes Google, MS and Apple). We are currently enjoying a royalty holiday (for free video sites) until 2016, when the organisation may or may not start charging royalties for the use of H.264 videos. Something video site owners and builders should certainly be aware of.
Holland Risley
MD – Mentor Digital – Bristol UK
Mentor Digital is proud to announce the launch of the new Cobalt website. Cobalt, a leading medical charitable trust supporting the NHS with £millions worth of equipment and services to enhance the lives of cancer patients and help the relief of sickness and other diseases.
We’re extremely pleased to announce our appointment by 
The BBC has announced that it is to release news and sport applications via the iTunes App Store – to the horror of many in the press industry. For me the real news here isn’t that the BBC seem to be relaxing their attitude to favouring individual suppliers but that the News industry as a collective didn’t see the BBC Apps coming.
