Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#11

Post by IgorPartola » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:07 PM UTC

SecurityMatters wrote: post #10

The author demonstrated why Firefox, et al, made the correct choice on his example page. I visited his page using Firefox and the video would not play. My guess is that you need javascript turned on to play the videos on his site. I almost never enable javascript, and certainly would not do so just to watch a little video. It sounds like Firefox and others are trying to make the web pages more universally work.

I am sorry but that is insane. Today's web relies heavily on JavaScript. I recommend you get yourself a clean browser (maybe on a virtual machine), if you are paranoid about security (SecurityMatters huh?), and try using Google Maps, Google Calendar, et al.

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#12

Post by kingkongreveng_ » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:16 PM UTC

Just post a normal ass link to a regular video file. Let the user's file type preferences and video player take over. Do the same for PDFs and audio.

Why are people going through conniptions trying to get a markup reader to be a video player?

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#13

Post by bphogan » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:25 PM UTC

kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #12

Just post a normal ass link to a regular video file. Let the user's file type preferences and video player take over. Do the same for PDFs and audio. Why are people going through conniptions trying to get a markup reader to be a video player?

They're not going through conniptions. A markup reader already can display images with the tag, and video is to the web what images were in 1995. However, the spec has an easy fallback - anything inside the video tag will be displayed on the older browsers. SO, as you said, that's where a link to download the video could be.

However, that's not what content producers want. They don't want you to be able to directly store the video on your machine, that's why they obscure it behind ridiculously obfuscated Flash players, making you go through all of these conniptions. That way you can't (easily) get it on your portable player or your home theater computer.

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#14

Post by bphogan » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:28 PM UTC

pkulak wrote: post #6

That is a problem, but it seems like it would be very easy to move the image - click for video behavior into a pretty small JS library. Writing something like this probably wouldn't be all that terrible: $(function() { $('#video_1').to_video('myvideo.mp4', 'myvideo.ogg'); }); I'd still rather do that than deal with Flash.

But see that's kinda stinky cos it's not semantic. You're not embedding the video element in the document so it can describe the content. It would be really cool if the js somehow could remove the video element or something and add it back in... but I dunno how possible that is.

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#15

Post by fhars » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:29 PM UTC

SecurityMatters wrote: post #10

The author demonstrated why Firefox, et al, made the correct choice on his example page. I visited his page using Firefox and the video would not play. My guess is that you need javascript turned on to play the videos on his site. I almost never enable javascript, and certainly would not do so just to watch a little video. It sounds like Firefox and others are trying to make the web pages more universally work.

Actually, your comment clearly illustrates why the choice Firefox et al. made is completely wrong. The only reason the video doesn't show in your browser is that he had been forced to use javascript hackery instead of a plain video elements to override this braindead default behavior. If they had made the correct choice, it would have worked for you, too.

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#16

Post by jiaaro » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:46 PM UTC

bphogan wrote: post #14

pkulak wrote: post #6

That is a problem, but it seems like it would be very easy to move the image - click for video behavior into a pretty small JS library. Writing something like this probably wouldn't be all that terrible: $(function() { $('#video_1').to_video('myvideo.mp4', 'myvideo.ogg'); }); I'd still rather do that than deal with Flash.

But see that's kinda stinky cos it's not semantic. You're not embedding the video element in the document so it can describe the content. It would be really cool if the js somehow could remove the video element or something and add it back in... but I dunno how possible that is.

Here's an idea:

Why not just add an onclick that puts in the `` tags?

that way you still have a `` tag but it has nothing to preload until you click it

note: I havn't tested this approach

Edit: Ok so I tried that in firefox and it doesn't work. But What if you make a video with 1 frame and a resolution of 1x1 and make that the source. Then you can replace that with onclick? (this one is more work than I'm willing to do out of curiosity, maybe someone else will try it?)

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#17

Post by est » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:49 PM UTC

DarkShikari wrote: post #3

Another flaw in the spec is that it provides no means to specify client buffering behavior: you cannot tell the client how many seconds to buffer before playback. This completely breaks the buffering model inherent in modern video compression systems and basically only works properly at all if the users' connection is far higher than the bitrate of the video. Until HTML5 has basic feature parity with Flash's video ca…

Well, it won't be long till whatwg find another usability issue with `video` and stuff, and expanding HTML5 to a full featured bloated media player stack.

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#18

Post by pyre » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 9:59 PM UTC

tumult wrote: post #9

DarkShikari wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually control the buffering/playback with JavaScript. There are various ways to do this; one is with the TimeRanges object http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#normalize... . which will give you a representation of available time regions in the video resource. I could understand this in mp4, which has a global index giving locations of all frames in the file, but how would this be possible in…

Then it probably doesn't work with ogg :) I personally think it's a huge mistake for Firefox to support only ogg. It's a bad time for fragmentation in the push for open video on the web. It should still be possible to get a rough estimate for when to start playback. Good enough for buffered autoplay.

The problem being patents/licensing. mp4 is patented up the 'wazoo' and has onerous licensing terms.

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#19

Post by windsurfer » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 10:00 PM UTC

tumult wrote: post #9

DarkShikari wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually control the buffering/playback with JavaScript. There are various ways to do this; one is with the TimeRanges object http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#normalize... . which will give you a representation of available time regions in the video resource. I could understand this in mp4, which has a global index giving locations of all frames in the file, but how would this be possible in…

Then it probably doesn't work with ogg :) I personally think it's a huge mistake for Firefox to support only ogg. It's a bad time for fragmentation in the push for open video on the web. It should still be possible to get a rough estimate for when to start playback. Good enough for buffered autoplay.

How can Firefox distribute the H.264 codecs without infringing on patents?

Re: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable

#20

Post by aw3c2 » Mon, Dec 21, 2009, 10:02 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #11

SecurityMatters wrote: post #10

The author demonstrated why Firefox, et al, made the correct choice on his example page. I visited his page using Firefox and the video would not play. My guess is that you need javascript turned on to play the videos on his site. I almost never enable javascript, and certainly would not do so just to watch a little video. It sounds like Firefox and others are trying to make the web pages more universally work.

I am sorry but that is insane. Today's web relies heavily on JavaScript. I recommend you get yourself a clean browser (maybe on a virtual machine), if you are paranoid about security (SecurityMatters huh?), and try using Google Maps, Google Calendar, et al.

"Today's web" works just fine without Javascript if you browse around. One can easily enabled it per-site in good browsers for the sites where you actually need it.

It has the nice benefit that a lot of distracting annoyances (just to mention snap.com, most advertising, those pesky "2000 social web icons popup" footers) simply disappear.

If you want '"today's web"' with all its glittery blingbling and distractions, then go ahead. But don't fall for the illusion that you would miss anything by browsing with Javascript off by default.