[whatwg] Some <video> questions

[Dave Singer]

At 14:47  -0800 29/01/08, Charles wrote:
>  > [Oliver]  Subsequently you turned it into the well covered topic
>>  of codecs...
>
>The question was:  As designed, is <video> a cross-browser, cross-platform
>solution for exactly one format, which is whatever is decided on as the
>freely-implementable and royalty free combination of container and
>compressed video and audio formats?
>
>Note that I'm not asking what those container and compressed media formats
>might be.  I'm just trying to understand the scope of the problem that
><video> is supposed to solve.

Video is intended, I think to cover
a) any mandated format that we settle on
b) any recommended or vendor-selected formats that the vendors choose 
to support.

This is in a context of a cascading series of <source> elements that 
can indicate, in preference order, which encodings the author is 
providing.

Charles, you know we're working on (a);  at the moment, we're 
covering (b) since (a) isn't yet settled.

But in the meantime there's lots of work also to be done on the 
question of what attributes, events, and DOM interface (for example) 
are right for this element, unifying that behavior.  The webkit 
support is intended to allow you to explore those, and other, aspects 
of integration (e.g. sizing integrated into the browser also).

Note that webkit is open-source, which I assume means you could apply 
such changes to your version as you consider to be improvements.

Exactly what extensibility should be and will be provided under 
various implementations of <video> in various browsers, and at what 
level (e.g. at the browser, framework, or codec level) remains to be 
seen, of course.

In the meantime, please see what the support does and what it teaches 
us;  it's important to get usage experience.


-- 
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime