Tag Archives: HTML5 video

Cool HTML5 video demos

I’ve always thought that the most compelling reason to go with HTML5 Ogg video over Flash are the cool things it enables you to do with video within the webpage.

I’ve previously collected the following videos and demos:

First there was a demo of a potential javascript interface to playing Ogg video inside the Web browser, which was developed by CSIRO. The library in use later became the library that Mozilla used in Firefox 3.5:

Then there were Michael Dale’s demos of Metavidwiki with its direct search, access and reuse of video segments, even a little web-based video editor:

Then there was Chris Double’s video SVG demo with cool moving, resizing and reshaping of video:

and Chris kept them coming:

Then Chris Blizzard also made a cool demo for showing synchronised video and graph updates as well as a motion detector:

And now we have Firefox Director Mike Belitzer show off the latest and coolest to TechCrunch, the dynamic content injection bit of which you can try out yourself here:

It just keeps getting better!

UPDATE: Here are some more I’ve come across:

Sites with Ogg in HTML5 video tag

Yesterday, somebody mentioned that the HTML5 video tag with Ogg Theora/Vorbis can be played back in Safari if you have XiphQT installed (btw: the 0.1.9 release of XiphQT is upcoming). So, today I thought I should give it a quick test. It indeed works straight through the QuickTime framework, so the player looks like a QuickTime player. So, by now, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari with XiphQT, and experimental builds of Opera support Ogg Theora/Vorbis inside the HTML5 video tag. Now we just need somebody to write some ActiveX controls for the Xiph DirectShow Filters and it might even work in IE.

While doing my testing, I needed to go to some sites that actually use Ogg Theora/Vorbis in HTML5 video tags. Here is a list that I came up with in no particular order:

I’m sure there’s a lot more out there – feel free to post links in the comments.

LCA 2009 talk on video accessibility

During the LCA 2009 Multimedia Miniconf, I gave a talk on video accessibility. Videos have been recorded, but haven’t been published yet. But here are the talk slides:

Lca2009 Video A11y

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: deaf captions)

I basically gave a very brief summary of my analysis of the state of video accessibility online and what should be done. More information can be found on the Mozilla wiki.

The recommendation is to support the most basic and possibly the most widely online used of all subtitle/captioning formats first: srt. This will help us explore how to relate to out-of-band subtitles for a HTML5 video tag – a proposal of which has been made to the WHATWG and is presented in the slides. It will also help us create Ogg files with embedded subtitles – a means of encapsulation has been proposed in the Xiph wiki.

Once we have experience with these, we should move to a richer format that will also allow the creation of other time-aligned text formats, such as ticker text, annotations, karaoke, or lyrics.

Further, there is non-text accessibility data for videos, e.g. sign language recordings or audio annotations. These can also be multiplexed into Ogg through creating secondary video and audio tracks.

Overall, we aim to handle all such accessibility data in a standard way in the Web browser to achieve a uniform experience with text for video and a uniform approach to automating the handling of text for video. The aim is:

  • to have a default styling of time-aligned text categories,
  • to allow styling override of time-aligned through CSS,
  • to allow the author of a Web page with video to serve a multitude of time-aligned text categories and turn on ones of his/her choice,
  • to automatically use the default language and accessibility settings of a Web browser to request appropriate time-aligned text tracks,
  • to allow the consumer of a Web page with video to manually select time-aligned text tracks of his/her choice, and
  • to do all of this in the same way for out-of-band and in-line time-aligned text.

At the moment, none of this is properly implemented. But we are working on a liboggtext library and are furher discussing how to include out-of-band text with the video in the Webpage – e.g. should it go into the Webpage DOM or in a separate browsing context.

If you feel strongly about video a11y, get involved at http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility.