Question

I have no idea why this isnt working.

<video src="American.avi" controls="controls">
<object data="American.avi" type="video/avi" />
<embed src="American.avi" />

All of the above tags return either “Missing Plugin” or have video controls that dont load a video. There is no link to install the missing plugin on chrome, there is on Firefox but it says no suitable plugins were found.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If you are trying to ensure a wide range of compatibility across browsers, then I believe the suggested method of embedding video using HTML5 tags is as follows;

<video width="480" height="320" controls="controls">
  <source src="American.ogg" type="video/ogg" />
  <source src="American.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <p>I'm afraid that your browser does not support the video tag.</p>
</video>

AVI is a video container, and could contain video in one of a wide variety of formats. As such, I believe it’s preferable if you can convert your video to .ogg and .mp4 formats to ensure compatibility across a wide range of browsers.

To clarify, the above code will show a single video player which will use any one of the provided source methods (but only one). So you can provide multiple formats for a given video window and the browser will pick which of the source elements that it can display and it will display that. So, with the above code, if the browser can play the .ogg version of the file it will, otherwise it will try to play the .mp4 file instead.