Video on the Web is being upgraded by the W3C
Wednesday August 27, 2008
The W3C has decided to take a look at Web video with the aim of making it a first class citizen. This is good news, as up until now, video (and it's companion, audio) have been difficult to place on Web pages, and have caused problems like slow downloads and difficult compatibility. I put up a video the other day, and it streamed great on my computer, but on my brother's Linux box, he had to download the whole thing before it would even play. And he couldn't even download the first version of the video that I made. So, if you've had trouble adding video to your Web pages, you're not the only one. Maybe someday we won't be forced to use the deprecated embed tag, and when we do use the object tag our videos will play.
I recently ran into an issue where IE7 would not play an embedded video without the warning: “Press OK to continue.”
It was the result of some copyright case, I could care less, I’m still appalled that warning came up every single time file was refreshed.
Currently I use swfobject, a javascript that obviates this issue and others. Just put the video url in the script variable string and put in a custom div tag for the file placement of the video. No more embed tags.
Still, it’s a pain, and you’re right, this is a real mess.
swfobject.embedSWF(”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-9076207989002864188&hl=en&fs=true”, “video”, “400″, “326″, “9.0.0″);
I wonder if this was motivated by Mozillas plans to implement audio and video tags as defined in the HTML 5 Draft, in current development by the WHATWG.