

HTML5 Video and the End of Plugins - milkers
http://blog.zencoder.com/2014/07/28/html5-video-and-the-end-of-plugins-recording-uploading-and-transcoding-video-straight-from-the-browser/

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shmerl
_> Some of the things I talked about, like Encrypted Media Extensions, were,
for the most part, still a pipe dream with few to no working implementations._

Why would anyone dream about this DRM junk? Something to dream about is for
example Daala codec which is supposed to arrive in 2015.

Also, is there any non patented and freely available technology for adaptive
video streaming? Unless DASH is not patent encumbered.

~~~
olefoo
You don't want to encrypt your video chats with your lover? With your business
associates?

I guess you Don't Have Anything To Hide™.

~~~
shmerl
EME has nothing to do with security and privacy. It's all about DRM. If you
want to encrypt your video chats you'd use something like ZRTP.

~~~
neohaven
Sadly, good, solid DRM (Here's an encryption key, an encrypted file, and a
secure way for me to limit when and how you can use those) _is_ the ultimate
form of Snapchat.

If you don't have DRM backing it up, the scenario is "Here's a key, a locked
box, do whatever you want with the decrypted file." Which is less secure than
being able to actually limit usage of the decrypted file.

Nothing here implies that I think DRM is a good thing, mind you. I just think
saying something is "just DRM", as if DRM wasn't basically encryption +
limitations on use.

~~~
expr-
> a secure way for me to limit when and how you can use those

That would be having them access the file in a restricted environment
(literally, guards and stuff). You can't have people accessing your secrets in
the comforts of their own homes and at the same time not be able to reproduce
them in some form – even if an exact duplicate of the original data would be
infeasible to obtain.

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harshreality
HLS (http live streaming, .m3u8 rotating playlists of chunks of video) isn't
supported by desktop browsers except for Safari. That seems to be preventing
live streaming sites from migrating away from flash. Notably, NASA's videos of
the Orion mission were on flash on desktop, but their mobile site (mobile
browsers—iOS, and Android since Honeycomb—support HLS) wasn't using flash.

~~~
jewel
The webm video container live-streams fantastically well. It's just the MP4
container that is broken and doesn't live-stream.

Note that if you put H264 in an MPEG2-TS container that it will stream fine as
well, but unfortunately that's not supported by browsers. (It also is
inefficient, which makes it a poor choice.)

There is fragmented MP4, (usually called fMP4), which is a single MP4 file
with multiple fragments inside. The last time I looked this wasn't supported
by any browser, but now it looks like there's been work to integrate it into
chrome and firefox.

The reason that single-file live-streaming is useful is that you can point the
video tag's SRC at a URL that just calls popen on an FFMPEG process and
transcode video on the fly, or even create new content immediately.

~~~
lern_too_spel
GP is talking about adaptive streaming with HLS. What you're discussing works
only if all your clients have the same bandwidth.

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seccess
I'm really impressed with how powerful HTML has become with respect to video
content. Of particular note is the Flow Player [0], which I love to see
websites use, primarily because it works without JS enabled! In addition, it
is fast and runs smoothly.

I'm simultaneously really (un)impressed how often websites over-engineer their
video content. Of particular interest is Youtube, which is neigh-unusable over
a slow connection because the player refuses to buffer ahead and constantly
tries to be smarter than it is by switching video quality :(

[0] [https://flowplayer.org/player/](https://flowplayer.org/player/)

~~~
Chris_Newton
Unfortunately, there are still some significant problems with the HTML5 video
support in several major browsers. Among other things:

1\. Chrome’s buffer size seems to be very small, enough to cause problems if
you’re trying to watch very high resolution footage or play multiple videos
together.

2\. If you serve over HTTPS, Firefox sometimes seems to warn about mixed
content even if everything is properly encrypted.

3\. Some popular mobile devices/browsers don’t send cookies when requesting
video files, which is a serious problem if you rely on those cookies for, say,
authentication of logged-in users.

4\. The canPlayType API is still one of the most bizarre and awkward I have
ever encountered.

5\. There is no standard for how video controls appear, or indeed if they
appear at all before the video is actually playing. Moreover, some browsers
will completely change their presentation of the controls as part of a
software update from time to time. This makes it all but impossible to make
clear to the user that something even _is_ a video that they can click to
play, if the video appears as part of a larger general content page rather
than the obvious main element in a dedicated player page like YouTube. It also
causes problems if you have short videos and include captions/annotations in
the lower part of the video, as the controls may just stay there and obscure
the content, which can be very frustrating for users.

I think HTML5 video will be a great development in time, but right now, it is
still quite an immature technology. You can use it fine in trivial cases,
which is sufficient in practice for a lot of useful pages, but all kinds of
not-that-tricky-really things are still broken. The more worrying thing is
that some of these issues have been broken literally for years, and the
browser makers show no great enthusiasm for fixing them, which hampers
developing anything using the HTML5 technology that is more interesting than
another basic video hosting site.

~~~
darshan
I'm not terribly familiar with the technical details, but my experience as an
end user is quite different from what you predict based on your knowledge of
the technical details.

I watch a great deal of HD video content on both Netflix and YouTube in Chrome
on Linux with only HTML5. I have no idea how big Chrome's buffers are, but I
can say that both of these sites work better for me with HTML5 video than they
did with Flash/Silverlight plugins. And without HTML5, I wasn't able to watch
Netflix natively on Linux at all.

So while HTML5 video may certainly have room to mature, it is already
significantly improving my experience of video on the web.

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qwerta
> Note – Before we get started, I need to be clear that the example we’re
> building only works in Firefox.

~~~
milkers
>> If you want to make this work in Chrome as well, there are projects such as
RecordRTC and MediaStreamRecorder.

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drethemadrapper
It's awesome to see that the Webrtc really started in Africa.

I saw this video very recently -
[http://bit.ly/1ytjdx0](http://bit.ly/1ytjdx0)

I also saw an interesting presentation of the researcher here -
[http://bit.ly/1s4kitL](http://bit.ly/1s4kitL) \- on HTML5 & Webrtc

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nakovet
Exciting! Just waiting for the adoption to be standard so I can try this for
real, for example Chrome 39 on OS X 10.10 don't support recording.

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Animats
_allowing the browser access to your camera..._

What could possibly go wrong?

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aikah
HTML5 video! available everywhere and broken for everybody.

~~~
NolF
No kidding! I tried to make a landing page with a <video></video>... seems
like you need 3 versions of the same video for cross browser format
compatibility...

