[Bug 10975] from gmail, JimJJewett said: Audio and Video should show the fallback content (for older browsers) if they do not understand the codec -- even if they understand video (or audio) itself

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10975

sam marshall <s.marshall@open.ac.uk> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
                 CC|                            |s.marshall@open.ac.uk
         Resolution|NEEDSINFO                   |

--- Comment #12 from sam marshall <s.marshall@open.ac.uk> 2011-12-14 17:09:56 UTC ---
Hi, I am coming across this problem now in development work for a real system
so I can give you the concrete example that you are asking for. Some of it is
related to the 'temporary problem' (will that really be resolved by 2014?) that
major manufacturers refuse to use .webm format, but not all.

Reopening as instructed, you can always close it again.

The reason why this is a problem:

1) We allow ordinary users, such as schoolteachers, to add video files. They
almost certainly won't understand anything about video formats; we let them
upload a range of formats (including crappy ones like .avi, as well as .mp4 for
instance).

2) Because this is an open-source system that can be installed on a range of
servers and is frequently used on cheap hosting (and also just because it would
be some work), we don't really want to implement automated format conversion
relying on a server-side tool such as ffmpeg - at least not yet - this might be
a good option in future but there are challenges there.

When we don't use HTML5, then for all file formats we can offer a fallback via
the object tag. The system allows for multiple fallbacks and the last fallback
is very simple: we give users a link where they can download the file. In most
cases, their operating system probably has a player for the file format.

The problem comes when using HTML5 audio or video tags. Here is the solution I
am currently planning to adopt for .mp4 files:

1) At the outer layer, use an object tag (which QuickTime will handle if
available).
2) Inside that, put the HTML5 video tag - conditional on a browser-detect
depending on the format(s) available.
3) Inside that, put the download link.

The browser-detect is needed because we'd like them to see the link not a
broken video (if they see the broken video, some people will call helpdesk
whereas there is nothing obviously wrong with our web page when you get a
download link).

So this is not impossible to make work if we ladle on enough server-side
browser detection and hard-code in knowledge about which browsers support which
formats in which versions. It just seems like the sort of problem that HTML5
was supposed to make easier, whereas this particular task is harder to achieve
than using the HTML4 object tag.

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Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 17:12:03 UTC