| |||||||||||||
Wikipedia's new HTML5 video playerWikipedia's new HTML5 video playerPosted Nov 29, 2012 18:12 UTC (Thu) by rillian (subscriber, #11344)Parent article: Wikipedia's new HTML5 video player
Previously, Wikipedia and its sister sites had embedded multimedia content in pages via an Ogg-only player (Theora for video, Vorbis for audio), which came with its share of difficulties for users whose browsers lacked Ogg support. I don't see how the new player helps with this. There is no browser with built-in WebM support which doesn't also support Ogg. Have that many people installed the WebM plugin for IE? Currently, the only way to get universal playback support with HTML media elements is to offer two encodings: one in a patent-encumbered format and one in a free format. Historically Wikipedia has refused to do this, and the later statement about waiting for the last mp3 patents to expire suggests they are not changing this policy. In Apple's Safari browser, the new player does say, "For a better video playback experience we recommend an html5 video browser," on video resources like this one. Which is a nice change from the similar messages vimeo has been showing me in Firefox for the past year and a half. I suppose that qualifies as an improvement?
(Log in to post comments)
|
|||||||||||||