Crash course: HTML 5 video

So you desire to add together HTML five video to your site? Here's how.

Senior Author, Computerworld |

If you lot desire to sentinel Internet-delivered video on your PC, the vast majority of Web sites have settled on a single, consistent mode to do that. That'due south the proficient news. The bad news is that this single, consistent delivery organisation is Adobe Flash, with all its security and stability issues.

But at present a new way to deliver video through a browser is coming to the fore, one intended to be native to the browser itself: HTML 5'southward <VIDEO> tag. In this article I'll look at how the <VIDEO> tag can be used with the new generation of browsers. I'll also examine how parts of this equation -- the browsers and, to some degree, the video formats themselves -- are too nonetheless very much in flux.

Online video before HTML v

One could fill a decent-size volume talking about all the formats that accept been used to deliver Web video at in one case or another: Microsoft's .avi and .wmv container formats and the gang of codecs delivered with them, Apple's QuickTime, RealNetworks' RealVideo and RealAudio formats, and and then on. Microsoft's Silverlight besides deserves mention, since it allows providers such as Netflix to distribute content with embedded copy protection -- a characteristic not likely to fall out of demand as long as money changes easily for video content.

However, the video delivery system that'southward near widely deployed correct now is Adobe's Flash.

The Flash Player was, and yet is, one of the few browser add-ons that almost everyone is likely to have. Browsers on Macs and PCs akin typically support Wink past default, since a growing corporeality of Web content in full general depends on it. It could be argued that Flash has become a video-delivery system as a byproduct of its original intention, which was to bring vector-based animation to the Web.

But Flash has bug as a video delivery system. It's proprietary. It requires the use of third-party lawmaking rather than something native to the browser. It has been lambasted for its lack of security and instability. The list goes on. It'south a solution, when people have been hungering for the solution.

Howdy to the <VIDEO> tag

The history of the <VIDEO> tag starts with the Web Hypertext Application Engineering science Working Group (WHATWG), a consortium made up of folks from Apple tree, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software. The WHATWG was created in 2004 to focus on the development of HTML five as a response to what it felt was the disregard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for real-world developers vis-à-vis XHTML and the and then-extant HTML standards.

The first proposals for a <VIDEO> tag were submitted to the WHATWG in 2007 past Opera Software. The idea was unproblematic: Create a framework in which Web browsers can natively play back video without being forced to fall dorsum on third-political party plug-ins. The user gets the experience of video that just works, those hosting the video have less maintenance to perform, and everyone walks away happy.

That'due south the theory, anyway. The practice has been some other story entirely.

The codec conundrum

When the <VIDEO> tag was offset proposed in the HTML 5 typhoon specification, ane key omission from the spec was which video (and audio) codecs would be natively supported by the browser. As a result, while there are several video codecs that tin be used in conjunction with the <VIDEO> tag, browser makers are not obliged to support any one of them: It's entirely their choice which codecs to include back up for.

The original programme involved specifying the Theora video and Vorbis audio codecs every bit a baseline that all browsers should exist able to play, only this was dropped in favor of an approach where no specific codec was recommended. Instead, the WHATWG expressed a desire for a codec that could exist used in an unencumbered fashion and had a better guarantee of patent indemnity than Theora/Vorbis offered at the time.

The change sparked criticism among developers and might well have been one of the motivating factors in Google's offer of the VP8 codec as some other baseline codec candidate.