[whatwg] Javascript API to query supported codecs for <video> and <audio>

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Sorry, my reply was cut short. Again:

It seems to me that it's a good idea to wait with this until we know
more about what will happen with baseline codecs etc.
Implementation-wise it might be less than trivial to return an
exhaustive list of all supported mime-types if the underlying framework
doesn't use the concept of mime-types, but can say when given a few
bytes of the file whether it supports it or not. Allowing JavaScript to
second-guess this seems like a potential source of incompatibility.
Isn't it sufficient to look for MEDIA_ERR_DECODE and add fallback
content when that happens?

Philip

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 17:34 +0700, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> It seems to me that it's a good idea to wait with this until we know
> more about what will happen with baseline codecs etc.
> Implementation-wise it might be less than trivial to return an
> exhaustive list of all supported mime-types if the underlying framework
> doesn't use the concept of mime-types, but can say when given a few
> bytes of the file whether it supports it or not. Allowing JavaScript to
> second-guess this doesn't seem great 
> 
> On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 12:18 +0200, j at oil21.org wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 12:03 +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote: 
> > > Why is that needed? The elements provide a way to link to multiple codecs  
> > > of which the user agent will then make a choice.
> > i do not intend to provide multiple codecs since that would require
> > multiple backend implementations for playing files form an offset,
> > encoding files in multiple codecs on the server, more disk space etc,
> > 
> > instead i would only use the <video> tag if the codec i use is supported
> > and fall back to other means via <object> / java / flash or whatever to
> > playback the video or indicate that the user has to install a
> > qt/dshow/gstreamer plugin. in an ideal world i could use <video> like i
> > can use <img> now and be done with it, but since this is not the case we
> > need tools to make the best out of <video>, not knowing what the browser
> > supports and just hoping that it could work is not an option.
> > 
> > j
> > 
> > 
-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Opera Software