[whatwg] Codecs for <audio> and <video>

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Charles Pritchard wrote:
> > 
> > This is on the list of things to consider in a future version. At this 
> > point I don't really want to add new features yet because otherwise 
> > we'll never get the browser vendors caught up to implementing the same 
> > spec. :-)
>
> Consider a programmable <audio> element as a priority.

Could you elaborate on what your use cases are? Is it just the ability to 
manually decode audio tracks?


> > > I'd like to see a font analog in audio as well. Canvas supports the 
> > > font attribute, audio could certainly support sound fonts. Use a 
> > > generated pitch if your platform can't or doesn't store sound fonts.
> > 
> > This seems like an issue for the CSS or SVG working groups, who are 
> > working on font-related technologies.
>
> Should it gather any momentum, this would be an attribute which 
> HTMLMediaElement tags should be aware of. For example: <audio 
> style="-ext-audio-font: tone|url(arbitrary.url)" />.
> 
> Should the audio source be a container format, such as midi, it would 
> interpret the css property.

If the CSS working group go down this road, I shall make sure HTML5 is 
compatible with what the CSS working group define.


> > > "User agents should provide controls to enable the manual selection 
> > > of fallback content."
> > 
> > There's no reason the UA couldn't provide an override mechanism to 
> > select an alternative source if the UA vendor so desires.
>
> I was considering the current dead-lock about the situation of h.264 and
> theora codecs.
> An explicit statement encourages UA-developers to adopt good practices.

I encourage you to contact the user agents directly. I generally try to 
avoid specifying UI in the specification.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'