Re: HTML 5.0 request for quick procedure to allow users to select one object and run it

On 24 Mar 2008, at 18:46, James Donley wrote:

> If I'm displaying an audio or video file on my page, I like to let  
> users
> choose which media player they use. For instance, for audio files,  
> some may
> like QuickTime, whilst some may prefer RealPlayer, and even others may
> prefer VLC. To the best of my knowledge, there is currently no fast  
> way to
> do this. Since the HTML 5.0 draft was started almost a year ago, I  
> hope it's
> not too late to request this feature in the specification.

Disclaimer: personal response, not a formal WG response.

It isn't too late to request additions to HTML 5 (work on it was  
actually started outside of the W3C almost four years ago now,  
actually), and it's unlikely to enter any kind of feature freeze for a  
while yet.

Back to this issue: to me this seems very much like something that is  
purely up for the browser to work out how to do: if you provide a  
standard format that QT, RealPlayer, and VLC all support (to follow  
with your example), it should be possible for any to be used. The only  
real shipping implementation of the HTML 5 audio and video elements  
(excluding pre-release implementations) is that of Safari 3.1, which  
uses QuickTime on both Mac OS X and Windows. WebKit itself, Safari's  
rendering engine, also uses GStreamer on GTK, and something else on QT  
(though it escape me what it is). What it uses is entirely down to the  
platform it is being run on. I don't see how, realistically, HTML 5  
can actually help in this matter any further than it is intended on  
doing so, by requiring some codec that every browser must support to  
comply to the spec.

Or am I misunderstanding what you mean? Do you want the user to be  
able to choose between multiple video elements, each of which  
containing a different media player specific codec, and not just use  
the same video for all?


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>