HTML5 Polyfills and One Video Tag to Rule Them All!

Just discovered this page, full of great goodness: http://html5polyfill.com

I was hunting for a way to avoid transcoding my MP4 video to WebM just for Firefox Mac (all other browsers, even IE 9, play MP4 natively). From that page I found this: GitHub - etianen/html5media: Enables <video> and <audio> tags in all major browsers.

With one line of JavaScript in the head of your page, all browsers are patched to display HTML5 video. As they say on that page, “there is no step two”.

After beating my head against the wall all day yesterday, and months ago when I first built the site for Comedy Central, this was a revelation. I could strip out all my hacks, all the wait-ten-milliseconds-then-call-a-function Rube Goldbergery, and just be done. I feel much cleaner now.

Walter


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Great find Walter - might there be an action in the offing?

D


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I don’t know if one is warranted – it doesn’t get much easier than pasting one line of script into the page!

Walter

On Jun 28, 2014, at 12:25 PM, DeltaDave wrote:

Great find Walter - might there be an action in the offing?

D


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I was just thinking that the action interface might have a picker to select the mp4 (and a poster image?) and add the js into the head as part of the process.

D


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Yeah, but Freeway 6 has HTML 5 video already in the native interface, and I try not to make Actions that duplicate the real UI, since they are usually way sub-par experience-wise.

Walter

On Jun 28, 2014, at 12:29 PM, DeltaDave wrote:

I was just thinking that the action interface might have a picker to select the mp4 (and a poster image?) and add the js into the head as part of the process.

D


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Freeway 6 has HTML 5 video already in the native interface

Fair comment.

D


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With one line of JavaScript in the head of your page, all browsers are patched to display HTML5 video. As they say on that page, “there is no step two”.

This isn’t strictly true. Using this with FF30 uses Flowplayer which is a Flash player solution.

I am not really a fan of Flash solutions.

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I am right there with you on that. For this client, this job, the issue was that converting to WebM, which must be done on the server, was doubling the time that it took to put a new video on line. For a bunch of impatient New Yorkers, that was simply unacceptable, and using Flash (which they all have installed) was a fine solution.

Longer version:

I initially built this “the right way”, with ffmpeg converting any non-mp4 format videos to mp4 and WebM, and any mp4 videos to WebM. Then to show them, I had a normal

Since the legal and standards department (who have to sign off on every poop joke that gets played on CC, are all billing at $750/hr, and have no interest or understanding of how to use a standard browser or install a plugin) started complaining that they couldn’t see any of the aforementioned jokes, the creative department suddenly discovered that transcoding was an acceptable trade-off after all.

So the new workflow accepts any form of video, converts it to mp4 if it wasn’t already, and shows a

Walter

On Jun 28, 2014, at 6:08 PM, DeltaDave wrote:

With one line of JavaScript in the head of your page, all browsers are patched to display HTML5 video. As they say on that page, “there is no step two”.

This isn’t strictly true. Using this with FF30 uses Flowplayer which is a Flash player solution.

I am not really a fan of Flash solutions.

D


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Thanks for expanding on that Walter.

So it is really only FF on Mac that will use the Flash solution - that I could live with until FF sort themselves out.

D


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