Video and Audio - Introducing HTML5 - page 94

What HTML5 multimedia isn't good for

Regardless of the somewhat black and white headlines of the
tech journalists, HTML5 won't “kill” all plugins overnight. There
are use-cases for plugins not covered by the new spec.
Copy protection is one area not dealt with by HTML5—unsur-
prisingly, given that it's a standard based on openness. So
people who need DRM are probably not going to want to use
HTML5 video or audio, as they will be as easy to download to
a hard drive as an <img> is now. Some browsers offer simple
context-menu access to the URL of the video, or even to save
the video. (Of course, you don't need us to point out that DRM is
a fools' errand, anyway. All you do is alienate your honest users
while causing minor inconvenience to dedicated pirates.)
Plugins remain the best option for a browser to transmit video
and audio from the user's machine to a web page such as Daily
Mugshot or Chat Roulette. (There is a highly nascent <device>
element rudimentarily specifi ed for “post-5” HTML, but there is
no support in browsers for it.) After shuddering at the unimagi-
nable loneliness that a world without Chat Roulette would repre-
sent, consider also the massive amount of content out there that
will require plugins to render it for a long time to come.

Anatomy of the video element

At its simplest, including video on a page in HTML5 merely
requires this code:
<video src=turkish.ogv></video>
The .ogv file extension is used here to point to an Ogg Theora video.
Similar to <object> , you can put fallback markup between the
tags, for older Web browsers that do not support native video.
Yo u s h o u l d a t l e a s t s u p p l y a l i n k t o t h e v i d e o s o u s e r s c a n
download it to their hard drives and watch it later on the operat-
ing system's media player. Figure 4.1 shows this code in a mod-
ern browser and fallback content in a legacy browser.
<h1>Video and legacy browser fallback</h1>
<video src=leverage-a-synergy.ogv>
Download the <a href=leverage-a-synergy.ogv>How to
¬ leverage a synergy video</a>
</video>

NOTE So long as the http
end point is a streaming
resource on the web, you can
just point the <video> or
<audio> element at it to
stream the content.