HTML5 video support

        

At Cantemo for our Portal product we are working a lot with HTML5 video, its starting to get really nicely supported by all the major vendors and we have some nice technology to support frame accurate playback, frameforward and frameback on a lot of browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc).

This puts us in a much better position than we have had in the past with h.264 playing back through the Flash player (though this is a fallback mechanism still).

Trouble is we have to implement support for different codecs, for the different browsers. Our software supports this out of the box, but it means that we have to do some interesting detection of browsers, formats that we have, and offer a plugin solution. Today we can transcode to OGG, WebM and h.264 with no problems, and then match this to browsers:

Here is a table of what browsers support which video formats:

HTML5 video format support
Browser Ogg h.264 (mp4 extension) WebM Notes
Safari * 3.0+ * *Safari will play what Quicktime supports
Firefox 3.5+ Use flash. 4.0+
Chrome 5.0+ 5.0+ 6.0+ h.264 will drop soon, still works as of 12
Opera 10.5+ Use flash 10.6+
IE - 9.0+ 9.0+* *Only works with optional plugin

This table assumes that h.264 is in an MP4 wrapper, with an AAC codec for sound. OGG is encoded using Theora, with a Vorbis audio codec.

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