Vlad Alexa's Blog

On the heels of the Firefox 3.5 release that brings HTML5 video embedding support the following pattern of embedding video files emerges (including on mozilla.com and openvideoalliance.org) that is two distinct sources for the video , one encoded with ogg , one with mpeg4 , using html code as follows :

<video>
<source src=”thefile.m4v” type=”video/mp4″>
<source src=”thefile.ogg” type=”video/ogg”>
</video>

What this does is show the mp4 file in safari and the ogg file in firefox , and it is all well and dandy except in the cases where a lot of media is involved it is unpractical at least to have 2 formats for every video file .

So let’s chose just one format then ,  because ogg is a open standard and endorsed by the One Video Alliance it is a safe bet  , sites like Dailymotion are already migrating to it .

Ok , how about browsers besides firefox , well safari for example can also support ogg video with a codec plugin namely Xiph Quicktime Component , but a simple test reveals a problem with the mime types , safari will not play the ogg file if  it has type=”video/ogg” in the html tag , works just when embeded ogg files have no type  defined.

At this point i am not certain whether it’s a bug or just a misconfiguration in osx or safari, apparently safari uses system wide mime-type settings that are accessible with System Preferences plugins like RCDefaultApp and MisFox but they do not help this cause a lot.

The point i am trying to make is that if you want to use a single format for embedding video and want it to work in all html5 compatible browsers (with ogg plugins) you best not define the type in the html tag if you want the video to work in safari.

Here it is , the first precompiled version of google’s Chrome browser for OSX , whether you want to test your pages in it , or just take a firsthand look of the development so far on the mac version be aware that this is a very early revision and very unstable , for example it just crashes when loading nytimes.com , most websites i visited work fine however.

You can download it from here (or Chromium.app and TestShell.app individually), inside are two apps , Chromium.app and TestShell.app , they are the Release builds of revision 9854 for Leopard (10.5) of Google’s open source code behind Chrome , which is actually called Chromium.

TestShell.app is just the core rendering view , Chromium.app is the whole app so far but websites do not always load in it and rendering can be garbled , just use TestShell to test pages.

I am not affiliated with Google or Apple and i do not take any responsibility nor imply any functionality of these builds i am making available , have fun.

In a age when the browser seems to be more important than the content in it , i invite you to take a trip out from the general mood and present you with a rough , but hmm.. revelatory proposition

These day you can also not speak about browsers without mentioning the “nothing short of a revelatory experience” firefox , but the ony thing i will say about it is that it is just a classy mozilla branch , nothing more , and mozila is nothing but a good browser , it is not a revelatory experience , but allow me to introduce to to something that might be just that

However the revelations it might present might not be understood by the regular , and its rough but profound features migh not be a match to the classy and apeal to the ones that never seen a piece of hypertext source in their life , still i present you http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

I strongly encourage the ones of you who might have a webpage somewhere to use one of the atached logos to link to http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ from their site , and this time Take back the code , the esence of the net and all software powering it , not something else.

*parts of the logos by http://www.amayaner.de