Tag Archives: Theora

First Linux Action Show released using the new HTML5 Video Tag – The RESULTS!

Posted by on July 6, 2009 4 comments

In my previous blog post, I talked about my concerned about the fanboi like rapid following of everything OGG, Theora, Vorbis and how it all sounds like just blind following with out any real consideration of the technology.

Even with my concerns with Theora, I wrapped the post saying that we’d be using VIDEO tag with OGG Theora. My feeling is I want the audience to get the content in what ever format they prefer, and I really believe making something like the video tag is very important for online content. While Theora has its limits and issues, the idea is a good one. I also realize that the issues I called out will never improve unless people use Theora today and so with that in mind the last three video on jupiterbroadcasting.com including the latest Linux Action Show episode have been posted with the video tag version of the show.

The results have been positive, especially from those with Firefox 3.5. Internet Explorer users, and older Firefox users get a flash player fallback. Safari users get a QuickTime h.264 fallback automatically.

I’ve had a few reports of people who experienced issues with the videos auto-playing, it would seem Firefox 3.5 has not yet implemented the autoplay=yes|no ability yet, while other browsers have and expect it. It would seem most browsers figure if autoplay= is not declared, the default is NO. While other browsers (think a slim few) seem to assume YES, and begin playing the videos on page load. Not only is that annoying, but when you are on our front page it means the current 3 videos posted using <video> start playing. Just about kills any browser.

To embed with the tag and keep the fancy code intact with a wordpress post, I have installed a WordPress plugin called RAW HTML, this lets me put a area in any WordPress post that get’s ignored by the WordPress editor, and is then passed on as raw HTML. I’ve had issues with the WordPress editor eating code before that I stick in the source of a post, so this seems like a great way to get around that.

Here is an example of an embed video:

My embed code was inspired by the Video For Everybody post that Kroc created.

W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs – Theora not mandatory

Posted by on July 3, 2009 9 comments
Theora FAIL

News is out that the W3C won’t mandate what codecs must be supported by a browser as part of the HTML 5 spec.

They state:

Apple, for its part, won’t support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>.

Now the bit there about Apple worrying about patents in Theora peaks my interest, but only because I had an actual IP lawyer say the same thing to just a little while ago, but just that he has “concerns”.. I’m starting to think lawyers every where say that about everything just because it leaves the door open for them to make a few extra dollars (hello Mono).

But that aside, I wanted to talk about another aspect of all of this:

One of the things that really bugs us Linux guys is how the fanboi tards of Apple and Microsoft (does MS have fanbois besides guys like Paul Thrott?) is the way they latch on to buzz words from he company, and then regurgitate them when ever they are challenged for details, or are preaching their path to salvation to someone when they really have no idea of the real technology behind that buzzword or if it truly is that great of a implementation.

But here’s the thing everyone, I’m starting to really come to the overall conclusion that OGG is just becoming an OSS buzzword.

Hear me out:

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