HTML 5 Video and Audio

I was playing around with HTML 5 video and audio elements. Specifically, I was
looking at how hard it would be to  add video and audio to posts. From the
coding-side it looks like it will be easy to provide support for them, but
there is one rather large catch when it comes to video encoding formats.

HTML is the language used to describe the content of web pages. The language
has been very stable since last version of the standard, HTML 4, which was
released over ten years ago. However, work is almost complete on the new
version, called HTML 5. One of the new features of HTML 5 are elements that
describe video and audio content, in much the same way as the "img" element
describes images. Work is already under-way implementing the video and audio
elements in all new web browsers, except for Microsoft Internet Explorer.

GroupServer could add video and audio tags whenever someone posted a video or
audio as an attachment. The results would look like the screenshots
"video1.png" and "audio.png" below. The HMTL code itself is very small — no
more than what we do for the existing thumbnail images, and is a lot less that
the code required to embed Flash video
<http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-html5-video/>.

There is one fly in the ointment: not all audio and video formats are
supported. Currently Mozilla Firefox and Opera support the free Ogg Theora for
video <http://www.theora.org/> and Ogg Vorbis for audio
<http://www.vorbis.com/>. Google Chrome supports Ogg Theora and the commercial
H.264 video; Apple Safari only supports H.264 video (Apple claims that the lack
of hardware support is a problem for Theora, which is a bit odd as Apple is a
hardware company).

A video in an unsupported format (such as H.264 in Mozilla Firefox or Opera)
will come up with a box much like the "video2.png" screenshot below. For more
complete support the videos could be converted from H.264 to Theora or vice
versa. I am unsure if software that will do the conversion requires a payment
of fees to the MPEG LA. (Apple and Google has paid their fees, which is why
H.264 is supported in the commercial browsers Apple Safari and Google Chrome,
but not their open-source equivalents, Webkit and Chromium).

Once a common video format is supported for viewing video I suspect that
content-creation in that format (from cameras and their supporting software)
will become common.

The standards battle between Ogg Theora and MPEG LA H.264 will be an
interesting one to watch from the sidelines. My guess is that Wikipedia will be
the one to force Theora support into all browsers, as they only support open
standards (which is also why all the audio on Wikipedia is in Ogg Vorbis format
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helter_Skelter_%28song%29>).

Anyway, that is enough fun for a rainy Saturday ☺