More on video4all, HTML5 <video> everywhere
permalinkIf you’re not familiar with video4all, let me start off with a quick intro: It allows you to use the standards-compliant HTML5 <video>
tag on any browser, freeing you from the complexity of configuring markup for multiple video formats.
I’ve been tweaking the video4all source a bit since last night’s late release to fix some issues with other browsers and clean up some of the code. Adding support for browsers without binding languages was pretty simple - a setInterval runs and checks for new video elements every few seconds, converting them to flash embeds as needed. It’s not ideal (DOM mutation events would be great here), but it does a decent enough job.
One problem that I’ve run up against is that Safari 4 under windows will actually eat your <video>
element’s
So, what’s next for video4all? First of all, I’d like to remove the hard-coded FlowPlayer control bar that the player uses. It affects the aspect ratio of the video, making it difficult to size these things properly. Secondly, I’d like to start work on binding the rich video JS interface to the flash control behind the scenes. Even making the simple methods to start and stop the video available would be a big help!
(unfortunately this demo is no longer available, sorry!)
If you are interested in helping make this project better, visit us at the video4all project site and join the discussion. I’d love to hear some feedback about potential methods to fix Safari 4’s broken parser, even if they are glorious hacks!
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