HTML5 Video and the End of Plugins

http://blog.zencoder.com/2014/07/28/html5-video-and-the-end-of-plugins-recording-uploading-and-transcoding-video-straight-from-the-browser/

by milkers • 12 years ago

126 42 12 years ago

blog.zencoder.com

nakovet• 12 years ago

Exciting! Just waiting for the adoption to be standard so I can try this for real, for example Chrome 39 on OS X 10.10 don't support recording.

qwerta• 12 years ago

Note – Before we get started, I need to be clear that the example we’re building only works in Firefox.

milkers• 12 years ago

> If you want to make this work in Chrome as well, there are projects such as RecordRTC and MediaStreamRecorder.

harshreality• 12 years ago

HLS (http live streaming, .m3u8 rotating playlists of chunks of video) isn't supported by desktop browsers except for Safari. That seems to be preventing live streaming sites from migrating away from flash. Notably, NASA's videos of the Orion mission were on flash on desktop, but their mobile site (mobile browsers—iOS, and Android since Honeycomb—support HLS) wasn't using flash.

lern_too_spel5• 12 years ago

HLS is on the way out. (Was it ever really in?) All the big video sites are implementing DASH.

rustyconover2• 12 years ago

I doubt this highly. And if they are moving to DASH it is implemented by Flash.

jewel• 12 years ago

The webm video container live-streams fantastically well. It's just the MP4 container that is broken and doesn't live-stream.

Note that if you put H264 in an MPEG2-TS container that it will stream fine as well, but unfortunately that's not supported by browsers. (It also is inefficient, which makes it a poor choice.)

There is fragmented MP4, (usually called fMP4), which is a single MP4 file with multiple fragments inside. The last time I looked this wasn't supported by any browser, but now it looks like there's been work to integrate it into chrome and firefox.

The reason that single-file live-streaming is useful is that you can point the video tag's SRC at a URL that just calls popen on an FFMPEG process and transcode video on the fly, or even create new content immediately.

lern_too_spel5• 12 years ago

GP is talking about adaptive streaming with HLS. What you're discussing works only if all your clients have the same bandwidth.

seccess• 12 years ago

I'm really impressed with how powerful HTML has become with respect to video content. Of particular note is the Flow Player [0], which I love to see websites use, primarily because it works without JS enabled! In addition, it is fast and runs smoothly.

I'm simultaneously really (un)impressed how often websites over-engineer their video content. Of particular interest is Youtube, which is neigh-unusable over a slow connection because the player refuses to buffer ahead and constantly tries to be smarter than it is by switching video quality :(

[0] https://flowplayer.org/player/

bkurtz13• 12 years ago

Can you really make that strong of an argument that YouTube's player is "overengineered"? I'm not always a fan of how they handle things but you have to at least consider the massive scale they are working at.

ishansharma• 12 years ago

Since he was talking about slow connections, and I have seen YouTube issues on slow connections, here are two main issues:

1. The bandwidth switching is really messed up. When I'm playing something and it has buffered, let's say another 10 seconds and then quality of connection goes down, player will not switch quality after playing those 10 buffered settings. Instead, it discards all buffered data and fetches lower quality video again.

2. On iOS, video just gets stuck on low resolution. Picture will freeze, audio may stop or keep going and position indicator loops between 4-5 second interval. It will move forward 5 seconds, move back to the point it froze, repeat.

Chris_Newton• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, there are still some significant problems with the HTML5 video support in several major browsers. Among other things:

1. Chrome’s buffer size seems to be very small, enough to cause problems if you’re trying to watch very high resolution footage or play multiple videos together.

2. If you serve over HTTPS, Firefox sometimes seems to warn about mixed content even if everything is properly encrypted.

3. Some popular mobile devices/browsers don’t send cookies when requesting video files, which is a serious problem if you rely on those cookies for, say, authentication of logged-in users.

4. The canPlayType API is still one of the most bizarre and awkward I have ever encountered.

5. There is no standard for how video controls appear, or indeed if they appear at all before the video is actually playing. Moreover, some browsers will completely change their presentation of the controls as part of a software update from time to time. This makes it all but impossible to make clear to the user that something even is a video that they can click to play, if the video appears as part of a larger general content page rather than the obvious main element in a dedicated player page like YouTube. It also causes problems if you have short videos and include captions/annotations in the lower part of the video, as the controls may just stay there and obscure the content, which can be very frustrating for users.

I think HTML5 video will be a great development in time, but right now, it is still quite an immature technology. You can use it fine in trivial cases, which is sufficient in practice for a lot of useful pages, but all kinds of not-that-tricky-really things are still broken. The more worrying thing is that some of these issues have been broken literally for years, and the browser makers show no great enthusiasm for fixing them, which hampers developing anything using the HTML5 technology that is more interesting than another basic video hosting site.

darshan• 12 years ago

I'm not terribly familiar with the technical details, but my experience as an end user is quite different from what you predict based on your knowledge of the technical details.

I watch a great deal of HD video content on both Netflix and YouTube in Chrome on Linux with only HTML5. I have no idea how big Chrome's buffers are, but I can say that both of these sites work better for me with HTML5 video than they did with Flash/Silverlight plugins. And without HTML5, I wasn't able to watch Netflix natively on Linux at all.

So while HTML5 video may certainly have room to mature, it is already significantly improving my experience of video on the web.

Animats• 12 years ago

allowing the browser access to your camera...

What could possibly go wrong?

shmerl9• 12 years ago

Some of the things I talked about, like Encrypted Media Extensions, were, for the most part, still a pipe dream with few to no working implementations.

Why would anyone dream about this DRM junk? Something to dream about is for example Daala codec which is supposed to arrive in 2015.

Also, is there any non patented and freely available technology for adaptive video streaming? Unless DASH is not patent encumbered.

olefoo• 12 years ago

You don't want to encrypt your video chats with your lover? With your business associates?

I guess you Don't Have Anything To Hide™.

shmerl9• 12 years ago

EME has nothing to do with security and privacy. It's all about DRM. If you want to encrypt your video chats you'd use something like ZRTP.

zimbatm• 12 years ago

When using WebRTC then data is already encrypted on the transport layer [1], otherwise use SSL. EME is a rebranding of DRM and nothing else.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-avt-dtls-srtp-07

lern_too_spel5• 12 years ago

The context is an article titled "HTML5 Video and the End of Plugins." For somebody who only cares about ending plugins, that quote makes sense. A majority of browsers will implement the spec plugin-free, and Firefox-based browsers will have a single sandboxed plugin with less power than an NPAPI plugin, which is the only realistic alternative.

shmerl9• 12 years ago

For somebody who only cares about ending plugins, that quote makes sense.

Replacing NPAPI plugin with some other DRM doesn't make anything better, whether it will be cooked into the browser or remain an external black box. Surely not something to dream about.

aikah• 12 years ago

HTML5 video! available everywhere and broken for everybody.

NolF• 12 years ago

No kidding! I tried to make a landing page with a <video></video>... seems like you need 3 versions of the same video for cross browser format compatibility...

drethemadrapper• 12 years ago

It's awesome to see that the Webrtc really started in Africa.

I saw this video very recently - http://bit.ly/1ytjdx0

I also saw an interesting presentation of the researcher here - http://bit.ly/1s4kitL - on HTML5 & Webrtc

HTML5 Video and the End of Plugins

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