Question

I’m trying to get my site using html5 instead of those ancient horrible horrible embed/object stuff. I exported the html to a test page.

It doesn’t work for me in Firefox or Chrome (on a Mac). Here are the goodies on this page:

<video width="500" height="350" controls="controls">
    <source src="/temp/output.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"' />
    <OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" standby="video loading" scale="aspect" HEIGHT="350" WIDTH="500" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
        <PARAM NAME="src" VALUE="/content/preview/350/aerial-tour-of-thebes-ramusseum.mov" >
        <PARAM NAME="autoplay" VALUE="true" >
        <param name="controller" value="true"><param name="loop" value="true">
        <param name="scale" value="aspect"/>
        <EMBED scale="aspect" HEIGHT="350" WIDTH="500" TYPE="video/quicktime" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" SRC="/content/preview/350/aerial-tour-of-thebes-ramusseum.mov" controller="true" loop="true" AUTOPLAY="true"/>
    </OBJECT>
</video>

Two questions :

1. what’s wrong with this code? I know mp4 is a valid format for html5, right? What’s the deal? and
2. Isn’t the point of all of this to degrade nicely in browsers that don’t have support? I just see a gray box with an x in it. Shouldn’t it execute the object/embed stuff and show the video the way it used to?

Answer 1

Some browsers doesn’t support MPEG4 for licensing reasons. This format is patented, so developers of these browsers would have to buy patent license for every user of their browser.

Firefox currently supports Ogg Theora and WebM.

Here you have format support matrix across various browsers/operating systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Table