HTML5 audio support

2011-08-09 Computing

As a followup to my last post, and also because Portal needs to support audio as well as video, I have implemented the same kind of detection and serving of files for audio. We transcode audio files into MP3 slightly low bitrate (depends on the clients wishes, but its not a great codec for streaming lots of audio over a network), and we can also do an OGG version. Here is the current support list:

HTML5 audio format support
Browser	MP3	Ogg	WAV	Notes
Safari	5.0+	-	5.0+
Firefox	Use flash	3.6+	3.6+
Chrome	6.0+	6.0+	-
Opera	Use flash	10.5+	10.5+
IE	9.0+	-	9.0+*	IE8 and before only support using flash fallback

Of course this doesn’t actually talk about the problems, such as MP3 always having silence at the beginning and the end of the file, and that Chrome’s support has been surprisingly bad over time. Its a pity that there are so many inconstancies and the specification doesn’t really seem to have been thought out (where is the buffering support?)

There is an even more in-depth view here:

http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audio