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.
