Video and Audio - Introducing HTML5 - page 113

The BBC has a similar experiment at http://open.bbc.co.uk/
rad/demos/html5/rdtv/episode2/ that takes in subtitles from an
external JavaScript fi le http://open.bbc.co.uk/rad/demos/html5/
rdtv/episode2/rdtv-episode2.js , which is closer to the vision of
HTML5, but it doesn't have the side effect of allowing search
engines to index the contents of the transcript.
Silvia Pfeiffer, a contractor for Mozilla, has some clever demos
using HTML5 videos and some extra extensions (that are not
part of the spec) at www.annodex.net/~silvia/itext/ .
Summary
Yo u ' v e s e e n h o w H fi M L 5 g fi v e s y o u t h e fi r s t c r e d fi b fi e a fi t e r n a t fi v e
to third-party plugins. The incompatible codec support currently
makes it harder than using plugins to simply embed video in a
page and have it work cross-browser.
On the plus side, because video and audio are now regular ele-
ments natively supported by the browser (rather than a “black
box” plugin) and offer a powerful API, they're extremely easy to
control via JavaScript. With nothing more than a bit of web stan-
dards knowledge, developers can easily build their own custom
controls, or do all sorts of crazy video manipulation with only a
few lines of code. As a safety net for browsers that can't cope, we
recommend that you also add links to download your video files
outside the <video> element.
There are already a number of ready-made scripts available that
allow you to easily leverage the HTML5 synergies in your own
pages, without having to do all the coding yourself. The Kaltura
player ( http://www.html5video.org/ ) is an open source video
player that works in all browsers. jPlayer ( http://www.happyworm.
com/jquery/jplayer/ ) is a very liberally-licensed jQuery audio
player that degrades to Flash in legacy browsers, can be styled
with CSS and can be extended to allow playlists.
Accessing video with JavaScript is more than writing new play-
ers. In the next chapter, you'll learn how to manipulate native
media elements for some truly amazing effects. Or at least, our
heads bouncing around the screen—and who could conceive of
anything amazinger than that?