Any implications of the new video handling in Firefox 3.5?
"Open Video and Audio. Enjoy video and audio content from within your browser, without the need for plugins. Video is a vital part of the modern Web, whether it’s used to communicate, educate, or entertain. Firefox 3.5 delivers the first native integration of audio and video directly into the browser. Now everyone can easily watch open format Ogg Theora videos.
Web developers can use these technologies to design pages that interact with video content in new and exciting ways, offering richer interactive experiences beyond controlling playback and volume."
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2009-06-30.html
Looking at our stats, I'd have to say, none whatsoever unless and until Internet Explorer supports it!
Don't get me wrong, I think it will be great to get rid of the plague of Flash players (including our own). But something that only works for 25% of our users isn't an option. The precise reason we all use Flash Video and nobody uses QuickTime, WMV etc is that Flash works for nearly 100% of users and nothing else does.
However if some schools run a 'closed shop' where they can guarantee the browser in use, this might be a relevant forward-looking option. It would be easy to add support to Moodle's mediaplugin filter.
The feature itself is great, it is crazy that people need to resort to a poor quality proprietary technology that restricts user control just in order to play a video. I assume the other browsers except IE will all support this in their next versions; let's hope IE9 follows suit.
--sam
Don't get me wrong, I think it will be great to get rid of the plague of Flash players (including our own). But something that only works for 25% of our users isn't an option. The precise reason we all use Flash Video and nobody uses QuickTime, WMV etc is that Flash works for nearly 100% of users and nothing else does.
However if some schools run a 'closed shop' where they can guarantee the browser in use, this might be a relevant forward-looking option. It would be easy to add support to Moodle's mediaplugin filter.
The feature itself is great, it is crazy that people need to resort to a poor quality proprietary technology that restricts user control just in order to play a video. I assume the other browsers except IE will all support this in their next versions; let's hope IE9 follows suit.
--sam
Perhaps the best approach with any browser technology is to gracefully degrade (or progressively enhance).
There is nothing wrong with serving video up to a flash player for IE users. But it doesn't take much extra effort to support the html5 video tag as well for those that can use it. The main cost is transcoding and storing video in a number of formats (ogg for firefox, mp4 etc).
There is some progress on fallbacks to html5:
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
If Moodle had a cross browser framework for displaying video and audio and a transcoding backend it could potentially increase accessability including access for many mobile devices which lack flash support.
Ofcourse the next step is to support annotation and indexing of media http://www.annodex.net/
Some sites currently trying out the video tag if you want to have a play:
http://www.youtube.com/html5
http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo
http://tinyvid.tv/
There is nothing wrong with serving video up to a flash player for IE users. But it doesn't take much extra effort to support the html5 video tag as well for those that can use it. The main cost is transcoding and storing video in a number of formats (ogg for firefox, mp4 etc).
There is some progress on fallbacks to html5:
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
If Moodle had a cross browser framework for displaying video and audio and a transcoding backend it could potentially increase accessability including access for many mobile devices which lack flash support.
Ofcourse the next step is to support annotation and indexing of media http://www.annodex.net/
Some sites currently trying out the video tag if you want to have a play:
http://www.youtube.com/html5
http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo
http://tinyvid.tv/
Hi Sam
My question was literally the single liner above, nothing between lines.
That being said, Firefox has become a strong player in the browser battle field. Listening to its likings is not time wasted. Considering that the currend Moodle header has fragments like [if IE 7], [if IE 6] what prohibits an [if FF 3.5]?
@SM and PS
Good to know that it isn't a big deal to support the new video feature. I know about the dominance of Flash technology in this area. That shouldn't hinder people from staying informed about the progress of open standards there.
Apparantly Firefox 3.5 is much faster too http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Mozilla_Pushes_the_Web_Forward_With_Firefox_3DOT5 We can expect most of the current 3.1 users switching to 3.5 unlike IE where IE6 is still being heavily used.
My question was literally the single liner above, nothing between lines.
That being said, Firefox has become a strong player in the browser battle field. Listening to its likings is not time wasted. Considering that the currend Moodle header has fragments like [if IE 7], [if IE 6] what prohibits an [if FF 3.5]?
@SM and PS
Good to know that it isn't a big deal to support the new video feature. I know about the dominance of Flash technology in this area. That shouldn't hinder people from staying informed about the progress of open standards there.
Apparantly Firefox 3.5 is much faster too http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Mozilla_Pushes_the_Web_Forward_With_Firefox_3DOT5 We can expect most of the current 3.1 users switching to 3.5 unlike IE where IE6 is still being heavily used.
the [If] stuff is IE conditional, so technically no that can't be done for Firefox :>
In reality though, yes it is technically possible to do this even where you need support for multiple browsers, but nobody is going to because as I understand it you would literally have to provide two video files - the Ogg Theora format video for Firefox, and the FLV for everyone else.
Putting a little switch on Moodle code would certainly be able to automatically handle which video file gets used - but for each individual video, each individual user would have to manually save the video into two formats and upload both. I really don't see that happening.
I don't know at all, but there might be some genuine prospect that IE9 gets this feature. (Microsoft aren't exactly in love with Flash... so maybe it depends whether they've given up on Silverlight by then...) Fingers crossed...
--sam
In reality though, yes it is technically possible to do this even where you need support for multiple browsers, but nobody is going to because as I understand it you would literally have to provide two video files - the Ogg Theora format video for Firefox, and the FLV for everyone else.
Putting a little switch on Moodle code would certainly be able to automatically handle which video file gets used - but for each individual video, each individual user would have to manually save the video into two formats and upload both. I really don't see that happening.
I don't know at all, but there might be some genuine prospect that IE9 gets this feature. (Microsoft aren't exactly in love with Flash... so maybe it depends whether they've given up on Silverlight by then...) Fingers crossed...
--sam
each individual user would have to manually save the video into two formats and upload both
That shouldn't be necessary, we can do something like wikimedia's OggHandler that automatically provides a java applet as a fallback.
Visvanath, you don't need conditionals. HTML was designed to handle new tags gracefully. A html5 browser will recognize the video tag attributes and ignore the content between the tags. A non-html5 browser will just display the content between the tags. So you put your flash object inside the html5 tag and it works everywhere. No conditionals, browser sniffing or javascript required.
Sam, I don't like making the user responsible for uploading in all formats. The cleanest solution is to have a media upload interface that transcodes to all the required formats on the server. Disk space is cheap so storing the media is not a huge issue. Much less error prone and confusing for the masses. But changes required to the way moodle handles media.
Alan, NOOOO! Java in the browser is aweful. Lots of people have it turned off. What is the fallback if you go this way. Flash is evil and proprietary and supported in 9x% of browsers. html5 allows multiple image sources to be supplied so the browser can pick a format it prefers. Supply mp4 and Ogg Theora and let the browser sort it out and fall back to flash for the 80-90% too ignorant to know what a browser is let alone get a decent one.
Sam, I don't like making the user responsible for uploading in all formats. The cleanest solution is to have a media upload interface that transcodes to all the required formats on the server. Disk space is cheap so storing the media is not a huge issue. Much less error prone and confusing for the masses. But changes required to the way moodle handles media.
Alan, NOOOO! Java in the browser is aweful. Lots of people have it turned off. What is the fallback if you go this way. Flash is evil and proprietary and supported in 9x% of browsers. html5 allows multiple image sources to be supplied so the browser can pick a format it prefers. Supply mp4 and Ogg Theora and let the browser sort it out and fall back to flash for the 80-90% too ignorant to know what a browser is let alone get a decent one.
I agree transcoding is the right way to achieve this. As a Java developer, I think Java in the browser is great! But it does have some downsides (long initial load time, lower installed base) that mean it's better to use Flash wherever that is feasible - which it certainly is for a video player.
However it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to (transcoding is going to be complicated as it will require installing, or specifying paths etc, for additional software) and you end up with a situation that, in practice for users, is no better and in fact probably worse than before: previously you have a standard interface [everyone sees the same, it works for everyone] and now you have a confusing dual interface [people see two different things depending, and it may fail or have problems for one or other group of users].
So I wouldn't be in favour of this type of solution except for a site where displaying video is the main feature / core mission. That isn't the case for Moodle. So personally I'm not too interested in the use of this tag until we get to a state where it is the single solution (and is happily implemented across most browsers, of course).
--sam
However it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to (transcoding is going to be complicated as it will require installing, or specifying paths etc, for additional software) and you end up with a situation that, in practice for users, is no better and in fact probably worse than before: previously you have a standard interface [everyone sees the same, it works for everyone] and now you have a confusing dual interface [people see two different things depending, and it may fail or have problems for one or other group of users].
So I wouldn't be in favour of this type of solution except for a site where displaying video is the main feature / core mission. That isn't the case for Moodle. So personally I'm not too interested in the use of this tag until we get to a state where it is the single solution (and is happily implemented across most browsers, of course).
--sam
On top of that, there's legal problems involving transcoding to many formats. Moodle can't ship with codecs that require end-users to pay royalties, it's against our license.
I think you missed the point. The javascript applet is the fallback (the thing you would embed inside the video element). It would be ignored by any browser sensible enough to support HTML 5 and theora.
The advantage of using Java here is that you can stick the theora codecs into your applet. As such, there's no need to provide two different file formats.
But your 'fallback' would run for 80% of (e.g.) our users. Or more accurately, try to run - for best results, you'd also need to provide a fallback on top of the fallback for those who don't have Java installed yet, which directs them to the Java installer rather than a blank hole in the page. (E.g. this one.)
Basically, nice idea, and this fallback could be fine for a geek site where you'll probably find a majority use Firefox (or Safari, Opera, Chrome, which I presume will all likely support this tag in a near-future version) and the rest know how to upgrade their Java version. But not something to subject generally-not-computer-literate students to unless there's no alternative.
Flash video players are proprietary, but practically they did actually work better than any other solution before Firefox 3.5 came out and they still work better than any other solution now.
That said if somebody did implement an HTML 5 video tag support for the multimedia filter for Moodle it would be really cool if it did also include the Java applet 'fallback' so I am not against this at all, go for it We just won't be using it here. Yet!
--sam
Basically, nice idea, and this fallback could be fine for a geek site where you'll probably find a majority use Firefox (or Safari, Opera, Chrome, which I presume will all likely support this tag in a near-future version) and the rest know how to upgrade their Java version. But not something to subject generally-not-computer-literate students to unless there's no alternative.
Flash video players are proprietary, but practically they did actually work better than any other solution before Firefox 3.5 came out and they still work better than any other solution now.
That said if somebody did implement an HTML 5 video tag support for the multimedia filter for Moodle it would be really cool if it did also include the Java applet 'fallback' so I am not against this at all, go for it
--sam
Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube
"Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/08/193209/Tired-of-Flash-HTML5-Viewer-For-YouTube
"Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/08/193209/Tired-of-Flash-HTML5-Viewer-For-YouTube
In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera
Re: Implications of video-tag in Firefox 3.5
by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera
Re: Implications of video-tag in Firefox 3.5
by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
> IE follows suit http://www.osnews.com/story/22506/Internet_Explorer_9_To_Get_GPU_Rendering_CSS3_HTML5_Support
That HTML5 happen to be H264 http://www.osnews.com/story/23229/IE9_HTML5_Video_Will_Be_H264_Only !
That HTML5 happen to be H264 http://www.osnews.com/story/23229/IE9_HTML5_Video_Will_Be_H264_Only !