HTML5 for Video Assets

HTML5 for Video Assets. by James Burke MerlinOne

Like most companies these days, MerlinOne incorporates video into our web presence. If you visit our product video page, you can find different presentations of our products – when you watch them, what you’re looking at is Flash video. Unfortunately, Apple’s mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad do not support Flash. For that reason, I started on a quest for a solution that worked on all devices. That quest led me to HTML5 video.

Recently there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding HTML5 video as an alternative to Flash. What I had originally read sounded so promising – video that could play on any device without the need of any additional plug-ins or proprietary codecs (we’ll get into codecs later). It sounded so easy – native HTML tags would allow the video to load and play with built-in controls. As I read further, the excitement faded away.

I was looking for a “one size fits all” solution and as I looked deeper, HTML5 video lost its luster. At the time of this writing, you will need to have a different codec and/or container for playback, depending upon what browser you use. In order to support everyone, we would have to encode the video to multiple formats including non-HTML5 video formats for those browsers (Internet Explorer, for the most part) that do not support HTML5 at all.

Continues @ http://blog.merlinone.com

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