5 ms·

How many formats do I need for HTML5 video?

72 points by jon_dahl 16y ago

kierank 16y ago
Too many.
- someone_here 16y ago
  Two is too many, I agree, but it will almost surely be 1 in the next coming months (assuming Microsoft supports WebM + VP8)
  - tvon 16y ago
    Are you choosing to ignore iPhone/iPad/OSX or is there something I'm missing?
    - thwarted 16y ago
      Will Apple choose to ignore WebM and VP8?
      - spicyj 16y ago
        Yes.
    - i80and 16y ago
      While I find the parent overly optimistic (the day IE9 ships WebM is the day that I take a flight on Hog Airlines), I think this is also missing the point. Hypothetically were IE to ship with WebM support, Apple doesn't have the market share to enforce their current codec monoculture. The converse is not true however; Microsoft doesn't care if Safari/iOS can play WebM. The onus is thus on the IE team, and I think Apple is irrelevant to the issue.
      - tvon 16y ago
        I have clients ask for videos that work on the iPad and iPhone, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
- jfb 16y ago
  No, it's not; video is complicated, and it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side than to expect every client to be able to a) play back any arbitrary bitstream or b) transcode on the fly. In a ideal world, we'd all be serving up 10-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV and your computer would be able to handle it (to say nothing of your phone); but until that happy day of unlimited bandwidth and free cycles, multiple bitstreams is hardly an onerous cost to pay.
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    That depends on your perspective. If you're producing and serving one ready-made video at a time, say for a video tutorial, maybe converting to multiple formats isn't much of a burden. If you're rendering videos, say for raytracing demos, and they take a lot of processing power to render and you have many of them, it's a significant burden to recode all of them multiple ways. Given that there is one way that is already well established and works reliably almost everywhere -- Flash -- I don't have much sympathy for HTML5 advocates who can't offer a solution that isn't at least as easy and customisable as what we've had for years already, nor for a certain brand of hardware that makes a point of not playing by the same rules as everyone else in the game.
    - GHFigs 16y ago
      I don't know what you mean by "customizable", but the easy solution is to just use Baseline H.264 with a modest bit rate. It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. Ogg is unnecessary, because everything that doesn't support H.264 natively supports Flash.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
        > It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. H.264 seems to be the most widely supported format today, if you don't get screwed by the whole patent mess. A significant class of users do, though, if only because they use OSS browsers that are never likely to support a royalty-encumbered format. And of course, if you're distributing H.264 videos you probably need a lawyer one way or another. As for customisation, Flash offers all kinds of possibilities that HTML5 video just doesn't, from custom controls to copy protection. Some people might not care, but they're probably the same ones who object to table-based layout and then expect you to write 20 lines of CSS and import three different IE-specific stylesheets just to get a trivial layout. Check out past comments from people who work at places like Google/YouTube.
runjake 16y ago
I consider the HTML5 bible to be Mark Pilgrim's work-in-progress Dive Into HTML5 book, which is available online. The part of the book that specifically covers this is: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works It's a great book with frequent updates and it covers everything, including local storage.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
callmeed 16y ago
I recently started doing some tech-related screencasts for our clients (photographers) at http://bigfolio.tv http://bigfolio.tv. I wanted it to be all HTML5 and I'm still experimenting. I ended up doing 3 H.264 versions (a large .mov and a large/small .m4v) and an Ogg file. Just to be safe, I put a couple download links for people. I haven't had any complaints but I did notice that older version of iOS can't play it. Haven't really tested Android. Getting them all converted and put on S3 is quite a PITA. Another thing I discovered–if you're putting Ogg files on S3, you have to make sure to set the mime-type or FireFox won't play it.
- aaroneous 16y ago
  .mov will only play in the Safaris, not even Chrome. Better to use a .mp4 and .ogv (or webm) if you're want to go pure HTML5 and have the best results across browsers. The mobile browsers have additional restrictions.
emehrkay 16y ago
Just ran into the mobile issue with file bitrates being too high. There are a lot of "gotchas" when doing html5 videos, but not too many that would scare you away from using it, you just need to test for a lot of cases.
henriklied 16y ago
Is there a simple way to do live streaming with WebM yet?
chopsueyar 16y ago
No recommendation on the multiple bitrate settings? Anybody?
snissn 16y ago
which of those formats can ffmpeg convert to?
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  All.
- est 16y ago
  but keep in mind all converts are lossy.
ars 16y ago
If I were doing this today, I would choose just x264. Deliver it via the video tag, with flash as the fallback for firefox.

72 points by jon_dahl 16y ago

kierank 16y ago

Too many.

someone_here 16y ago
Two is too many, I agree, but it will almost surely be 1 in the next coming months (assuming Microsoft supports WebM + VP8)
- tvon 16y ago
  Are you choosing to ignore iPhone/iPad/OSX or is there something I'm missing?
  - thwarted 16y ago
    Will Apple choose to ignore WebM and VP8?
    - spicyj 16y ago
      Yes.
  - i80and 16y ago
    While I find the parent overly optimistic (the day IE9 ships WebM is the day that I take a flight on Hog Airlines), I think this is also missing the point. Hypothetically were IE to ship with WebM support, Apple doesn't have the market share to enforce their current codec monoculture. The converse is not true however; Microsoft doesn't care if Safari/iOS can play WebM. The onus is thus on the IE team, and I think Apple is irrelevant to the issue.
    - tvon 16y ago
      I have clients ask for videos that work on the iPad and iPhone, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
jfb 16y ago
No, it's not; video is complicated, and it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side than to expect every client to be able to a) play back any arbitrary bitstream or b) transcode on the fly. In a ideal world, we'd all be serving up 10-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV and your computer would be able to handle it (to say nothing of your phone); but until that happy day of unlimited bandwidth and free cycles, multiple bitstreams is hardly an onerous cost to pay.
- Silhouette 16y ago
  That depends on your perspective. If you're producing and serving one ready-made video at a time, say for a video tutorial, maybe converting to multiple formats isn't much of a burden. If you're rendering videos, say for raytracing demos, and they take a lot of processing power to render and you have many of them, it's a significant burden to recode all of them multiple ways. Given that there is one way that is already well established and works reliably almost everywhere -- Flash -- I don't have much sympathy for HTML5 advocates who can't offer a solution that isn't at least as easy and customisable as what we've had for years already, nor for a certain brand of hardware that makes a point of not playing by the same rules as everyone else in the game.
  - GHFigs 16y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "customizable", but the easy solution is to just use Baseline H.264 with a modest bit rate. It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. Ogg is unnecessary, because everything that doesn't support H.264 natively supports Flash.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      > It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. H.264 seems to be the most widely supported format today, if you don't get screwed by the whole patent mess. A significant class of users do, though, if only because they use OSS browsers that are never likely to support a royalty-encumbered format. And of course, if you're distributing H.264 videos you probably need a lawyer one way or another. As for customisation, Flash offers all kinds of possibilities that HTML5 video just doesn't, from custom controls to copy protection. Some people might not care, but they're probably the same ones who object to table-based layout and then expect you to write 20 lines of CSS and import three different IE-specific stylesheets just to get a trivial layout. Check out past comments from people who work at places like Google/YouTube.

runjake 16y ago

I consider the HTML5 bible to be Mark Pilgrim's work-in-progress Dive Into HTML5 book, which is available online. The part of the book that specifically covers this is: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works It's a great book with frequent updates and it covers everything, including local storage.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

callmeed 16y ago

I recently started doing some tech-related screencasts for our clients (photographers) at http://bigfolio.tv http://bigfolio.tv. I wanted it to be all HTML5 and I'm still experimenting. I ended up doing 3 H.264 versions (a large .mov and a large/small .m4v) and an Ogg file. Just to be safe, I put a couple download links for people. I haven't had any complaints but I did notice that older version of iOS can't play it. Haven't really tested Android. Getting them all converted and put on S3 is quite a PITA. Another thing I discovered–if you're putting Ogg files on S3, you have to make sure to set the mime-type or FireFox won't play it.

aaroneous 16y ago
.mov will only play in the Safaris, not even Chrome. Better to use a .mp4 and .ogv (or webm) if you're want to go pure HTML5 and have the best results across browsers. The mobile browsers have additional restrictions.

emehrkay 16y ago

Just ran into the mobile issue with file bitrates being too high. There are a lot of "gotchas" when doing html5 videos, but not too many that would scare you away from using it, you just need to test for a lot of cases.

henriklied 16y ago

Is there a simple way to do live streaming with WebM yet?

chopsueyar 16y ago

No recommendation on the multiple bitrate settings? Anybody?

snissn 16y ago

which of those formats can ffmpeg convert to?

chopsueyar 16y ago
All.
est 16y ago
but keep in mind all converts are lossy.

ars 16y ago

If I were doing this today, I would choose just x264. Deliver it via the video tag, with flash as the fallback for firefox.