As you’re no doubt aware, HTML5 video is this year’s big thing — but there’s a dispute going on about which should become the default standard video codec. The current nascent de facto standard is H.264, but recently the new WebM format is gaining traction.
I’ve no idea how the web video format war will end. My preference is that a free, non-patent encumbered, high-quality video codec will become the standard, and WebM is the best fit for that description. Despite the recent announcement by the MPEG LA, the patent pool which controls licensing of H.264, that it will always be free for ‘video delivered to the internet without charge’, that still doesn’t make it free-as-in-speech, and still not free-as-in-beer for anyone wanting to build a business around video encoding/decoding (which includes, if I’m not mistaken, bundling it with a browser). All that said, my preference is meaningless in the face of so many vested business interests.
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I’m a big fan of using nightly and pre-release versions of browsers; not for day-to-day use, but to find out what new features are on their way. Obviously this is made a lot easier when detailed changelogs are provided.
Firefox do a great job of this with their website The Burning Edge, which gives fortnightly (more or less) lists of changes in the latest trunk builds, and Opera’s Desktop Team Blog does likewise on a semi-regular basis. The Internet Explorer team have done a good job of documenting all the changes in IE9 with the Platform Preview Release Notes.
The notable exception seems to be WebKit. I’ve looked around but I can’t find any site which gives an overview of changes in the nightly builds. I could subscribe to the RSS feed of their Trac, but it would be a nightmare trying to find the interesting features amongst all the technical changes. The Surfin’ Safari and Planet WebKit aren’t any help.
So does anyone know how to find this information for WebKit? I can’t believe it doesn’t exist.
Update: As if by magic, look what I found just a day later: Last week in.. WebKit and Chromium!
In my previous post, Making HTML5 Video work on Android phones, I said that you have to encode your videos as .m4v in order for them to work in Android. This isn’t actually correct. The suffix can be either .mp4 or .m4v, what matters is the way the video is encoded.
Now, there are loads of blog and forum posts which give differing advice on presets and parameters, and I’m no expert — so what I’ll do is just show you two quick ways that worked for me (I have a Samsung Galaxy S).
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I recently became the owner of an Android phone* and found that, despite it being listed as a feature of the browser, the HTML5 video element didn’t work for almost all of the examples I tried. I’ve just done some experimentation with this and think I’ve found a solution, so this post is offered in the hope that it helps anyone who may be tearing their hair out over the same problem.
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My last post was about using SVG values for the background-image property, and I pointed out one big problem with the technique:
The drawback of this is that it’s not ready for use just yet — browsers that don’t support SVG in background-image will not provide any fallback, even if you supply another background-image value; so in non-supporting browsers, no image at all will be displayed.
This was annoying me a little, and I couldn’t find any workarounds that didn’t use JavaScript. However, after a bit of head-scratching I’ve come up with a way to get around it.
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While having a look through the list of features for developers planned for Firefox 4 earlier today, I noticed this:
You can now use SVG with the img element, as well as the background image in CSS.
I know you can already use SVG in background-image with Safari, Chrome and Opera, and this, coupled with Internet Explorer’s push towards SVG and the strong chance this will be available in IE9, made me decide to take a closer look.
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I hope you’ll forgive a little self-promotion, as I’d just like to play a few quick notes on my own trumpet. The latest issue of Net magazine is now on sale, and features a tutorial article, Create A Dynamic Content Panel, written by me.
In the article I explain how to build a dynamic Contact area, as we did on our recent redesign of Preloaded.com, using the Web Storage API and the BBC’s Glow Javascript library.
I’m not sure what the rights situation is with this article, but I hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to post it here on my blog. But in the meantime, you can buy a copy of Net magazine in the UK at all good newsagents, as the saying goes (I don’t know if it will be in overseas editions also).
On the subject of print, I’m also currently writing a book about CSS3 which should be published later this year. I’ll have more information on that nearer the time.