[whatwg] Scripted querying of <video> capabilities

[Henri Sivonen]

On Aug 20, 2008, at 12:39, timeless wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi>  
> wrote:
>> Would the situation be any different for the <source> element  
>> fallback?
>
> yes. people wouldn't try to ask us questions we can't answer. instead
> they'd be giving gecko lots of data and it'd figure it out.
[...]
>> but ships with the GStreamer back end and a third party provides an  
>> Ogg
>> plugin for GStreamer, as a user I'd want video on Wikipedia to Just  
>> Work if
>> the third-party GStreamer Ogg plugin is installed.
>
> yes, i'd expect it to just work. however i'd also expect the apis not
> to work correctly. which means we'd probably be stuck with a case
> where we either lie and say ogg isn't supported (because we have no
> way to figure out if it's supported), which means it wouldn't work. or
> we'd lie and say it is supported (which means that if someone sniffs
> for ogg first, they'd send you ogg only and you would get nothing).

Wouldn't it follow that dispatch based on the attributes on the  
<source> element wouldn't work, either?

Doesn't GStreamer have any working API for querying what capabilities  
it has installed?

> people should just provide <source> tags for all formats they have in
> the order in which they'd like to send them. let the user agents
> figure it out.

Do you mean trying to download each video, giving it to GStreaming and  
seeing if an error code comes back?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/