Tag Archives: Theora

Few Thoughts on Web Video

On Air


It’s really full of video sharing websites out there, but in fact almost all of them use Flash player to display their video files. This is the reality now, but with the coming of HTML5, perhaps the things are changing a bit!

First of all if you start dealing with video sharing platforms the first thing to do maybe is to find a good Flash (.flv) player and to convert all your video content in FLV.

Few things to know with Flash video players:

  1. The user can play those videos only after installing the Flash Plugin to his browser;
  2. The video must be encoded either in FLV (or FLash Video) or in MPEG-4 with h.264 codec. Only than the Flash player can play it;

The HTML5, which can be described as variety of new “things” in the HTML comes with a native <video> tag. Something like the <img> tag where you can just point the source of the image in the src attribute. Continue reading Few Thoughts on Web Video

Video sites must use … mp4 and only mp4!

H.264

Yes it may sound strange, but now with the upcoming HTML5 features every browser again is playing its own game. Firefox and Opera support only OGG Theora, Chrome and Safari only MP4 and what about IE .. it doesn’t support anything. Than why should we convert to mp4 with h.264 codec?

Because everybody is playing flash

And that’s again very sad but at least the flash players are playing mp4 with this encoding, which is good because this file will be playable under most of the mobiles. And if you have a large video site to support why don’t you convert to mp4 and play it with a Flash Player and give the opportunity to play mp4 on mobile.

Only one file under the sky

Thus you gain to keep only one file – playable under every device?

YouTube and FLV

Now I wonder why YouTube have both FLV and MP4 formats?

Of course if you’d like to be perfect …

Convert every video to MP4, FLV and OGG, but that means 3 files for every video?!

Opera supports the video tag!

Opera 10.50

Today I saw a interesting article in one of my favorite blogs – ajaxian.com. From now on Opera will support the <video> tag in the new version 10.50.

Actually there is a bunch of new features in that version, but I was curious which codec will be supported, as I was interested in that from my previous post!

The codec is …

supporting OGG. Vorbis and Theora!