Encoding Video for Android
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).
Making HTML5 Video work on Android phones
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.
My Name In Print
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.
Building a better HTML5 video player with Glow
Last year I wrote a post (Building HTML5 video controls with JavaScript) introducing the HTML5 Media Elements API and demonstrating a simple set of controls for playing video.
In this (somewhat belated) follow-up I’m going to explore building a more interactive set of controls using a JavaScript UI library; I’m going to use Glow, but it could easily be adapted to jQuery UI or similar.
Building Preloaded.com: The Front-end
This subject of this post is the redesign of my employer’s website, Preloaded.com, and is cross-posted from the Preloaded blog with permission.
At the beginning of the redesign project we agreed some design tenets: the new site should be a best-practice showcase and an opportunity to learn and use some of the latest web technologies; and it should employ existing services where practical.
Building HTML5 video controls with JavaScript
The HTML5 video element is now included in Firefox, Safari & Chrome, and on its way in Opera. By using JavaScript to access the media elements API it’s easy to build your own custom controls for it; in this article I’m going to show how I built a (very) basic control interface.
Aside
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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