Advanced CSS Design Resources - last-child.com » Video http://www.last-child.com CSS Toys for Professional Web Developers Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:30:15 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Cross-browser HTML5 video tag with fallback for Flash users http://www.last-child.com/cross-browser-html5-video/ http://www.last-child.com/cross-browser-html5-video/#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:00:44 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=235 Apple’s lack of support for Flash on the iPhone and iPad has forced people to reconsider the value of HTML5 and its video tag. It’s no longer something to put off until the future. However, adding HTML5 video support to your site AND continue to provide a Flash option for older browsers (I.E.) is not as simple as you might expect.

While the video tag has been standardized, there is a lack of consensus for supporting the codecs used to package the videos for distribution and playback. Some browsers are supporting the OGV format, some support the more popular but licensed mp4 format. Others, such as Chrome, will support both. To make it even more exciting, there is a new version under development to make a truly open-sourced format: WebM.

This means your video tag needs to define multiple movie sources to make it playable on all browsers. It sounds complicated because it is. Luckily, Kroc Camen has written a great article and code pattern for adding a cross-browser video tag with fallback to Flash for the older browsers: Video for Everybody!.

The article is full of great advice from a programmer that has learned the stuff the hard way. Here’s an explanation of how you’ll need to adjust your htaccess file.

Ensure your server is using the correct mime-types. Firefox will not
play the OGG video if the mime-type is wrong. Place these lines in your .htaccess
file to send the correct mime-types to browsers 


AddType video/ogg  .ogv
AddType video/mp4  .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Video for Everybody! – Kroc Camen

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/cross-browser-html5-video/feed/ 0 Captioning Sucks and Needs a Jump Start http://www.last-child.com/closed-captioning-need-a-jump-start/ http://www.last-child.com/closed-captioning-need-a-jump-start/#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:00:29 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/closed-captioning-need-a-jump-start/ Captioning Sucks - No shit Sherlock, lets fix it
The internet is awash in video. YouTube, Yahoo Video, and other video sites host millions of videos with little attention to close captioning. For many sites, the text translations exist, they simply are not used. This sucks.

Television shows have featured captioning for many years. It’s sometimes the only way to figure out what they are saying on South Park. However, captioning standards are all over the place, the quality of text is questionable, and the industry is not supporting new innovations. This sucks.

Joe Clark is working on a new standard to fix these issues. He probably knows more about captioning than any other breathing creature in the world CaptioningSucks.com is the new home to the future of captioning. Perhaps it is time to buy the domain: CaptioningRules.com, for hopefully it won’t suck much longer.

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