

How many formats do I need for HTML5 video? - jon_dahl
http://zencoder.com/encoder-blog/2010/10/06/how-many-formats-do-i-need-for-html5-video/

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runjake
I consider the HTML5 bible to be Mark Pilgrim's work-in-progress Dive Into
HTML5 book, which is available online.

The part of the book that specifically covers this is:

<http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works>

It's a great book with frequent updates and it covers everything, including
local storage.

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callmeed
I recently started doing some tech-related screencasts for our clients
(photographers) at <http://bigfolio.tv>.

I wanted it to be all HTML5 and I'm still experimenting. I ended up doing 3
H.264 versions (a large .mov and a large/small .m4v) and an Ogg file. Just to
be safe, I put a couple download links for people.

I haven't had any complaints but I did notice that older version of iOS can't
play it. Haven't really tested Android.

Getting them all converted and put on S3 is quite a PITA. Another thing I
discovered–if you're putting Ogg files on S3, you have to make sure to set the
mime-type or FireFox won't play it.

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aaroneous
.mov will only play in the Safaris, not even Chrome.

Better to use a .mp4 and .ogv (or webm) if you're want to go pure HTML5 and
have the best results across browsers. The mobile browsers have additional
restrictions.

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emehrkay
Just ran into the mobile issue with file bitrates being too high. There are a
lot of "gotchas" when doing html5 videos, but not too many that would scare
you away from using it, you just need to test for a lot of cases.

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ars
If I were doing this today, I would choose just x264. Deliver it via the video
tag, with flash as the fallback for firefox.

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kierank
Too many.

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jfb
No, it's not; video is complicated, and it's a lot easier in aggregate to do
multiple transcodes on the server side than to expect every client to be able
to a) play back any arbitrary bitstream or b) transcode on the fly. In a ideal
world, we'd all be serving up 10-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV and your computer would be
able to handle it (to say nothing of your phone); but until that happy day of
unlimited bandwidth and free cycles, multiple bitstreams is hardly an onerous
cost to pay.

~~~
Silhouette
That depends on your perspective. If you're producing and serving one ready-
made video at a time, say for a video tutorial, maybe converting to multiple
formats isn't much of a burden. If you're _rendering_ videos, say for
raytracing demos, and they take a lot of processing power to render and you
have many of them, it's a significant burden to recode all of them multiple
ways. Given that there is one way that is already well established and works
reliably almost everywhere -- Flash -- I don't have much sympathy for HTML5
advocates who can't offer a solution that isn't at least as easy and
customisable as what we've had for years already, nor for a certain brand of
hardware that makes a point of not playing by the same rules as everyone else
in the game.

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GHFigs
I don't know what you mean by "customizable", but the _easy_ solution is to
just use Baseline H.264 with a modest bit rate. It plays on everything mobile,
plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. Ogg is
unnecessary, because everything that doesn't support H.264 natively supports
Flash.

~~~
Silhouette
> It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in
> Flash everywhere else.

H.264 seems to be the most widely supported format today, if you don't get
screwed by the whole patent mess. A significant class of users do, though, if
only because they use OSS browsers that are never likely to support a royalty-
encumbered format. And of course, if you're distributing H.264 videos you
probably need a lawyer one way or another.

As for customisation, Flash offers all kinds of possibilities that HTML5 video
just doesn't, from custom controls to copy protection. Some people might not
care, but they're probably the same ones who object to table-based layout and
then expect you to write 20 lines of CSS and import three different IE-
specific stylesheets just to get a trivial layout. Check out past comments
from people who work at places like Google/YouTube.

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henriklied
Is there a simple way to do live streaming with WebM yet?

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chopsueyar
No recommendation on the multiple bitrate settings? Anybody?

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snissn
which of those formats can ffmpeg convert to?

~~~
est
but keep in mind all converts are lossy.

