[whatwg] Serving up Theora <video> in the real world

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:20 +0200, Robert O'Callahan  
<robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Philip Jägenstedt  
> <philipj at opera.com>wrote:
>
>> Not that I except this discussion to go anywhere, but out of curiosity I
>> checked how Firefox/Safari/Chrome actually implement canPlayType:
>>
>> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Video_type_parameters#Browser_Support
>>
>> Firefox is conservative and honest (except maybe for "audio/wav;  
>> codecs=0",
>> what could you do with the RIFF DATA chunk?)
>
>
> Wave codec 0 means "unknown codec", so we return "maybe", but we should
> actually return "no" since in practice we refuse to play a file with 0 in
> the format field. We'll fix that.
>
> Safari gets maybe/probably backwards compared to what the spec suggests.
>> Chrome seems to ignore the codecs parameter, claiming "probably" even  
>> for
>> bogus codecs. Authors obviously can't trust the distinction between  
>> "maybe"
>> and "probably" to any extent.
>>
>
> Please file bugs against those browsers --- especially Chrome, since they
> haven't shipped video support yet.
>
> It's not hard to implement this right, these issues reflect sloppy
> development more than a fundamental problem IMHO.

I agree that this isn't hard (even when using platform media frameworks),  
I'm only arguing that it isn't useful. However, both Mozilla and Apple  
representatives think differently, so I will not bother with this issue  
any more and simply implement it per spec as written. Also, I've reported  
bugs on Safari and Chrome (I think, neither give confirmation that the  
report has been sent successfully!)

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software