Audio and Video - HTML5 with Visual Studio 2012 - page 181

As with audio, you can encode a video file in multiple formats and provide several sources so the browser
can select one that it supports. You can see from Table 8-2 that if you support MP4 plus either Ogg or WebM your
page will be compatible with most browsers.
Converting Video Formats
The first thing you'll need is a sample video that is encoded in multiple formats. Windows provides a sample video
clip named Wildlife.wmv that I'll use for the initial demo. To create an Ogg or WebM file, I recommend using the
Firefogg plugin for Firefox. It's easy to install and use and I've found it to work well. If you prefer, there are other
utilities that will convert to these formats including the XMedia Recode application that I mentioned earlier.
Using Firefogg
To install Firefogg, start Firefox and then navigate to the Firefogg site ( http://firefogg.org ) . If the plugin is not
installed the page provides a link to install it for you. Once this is installed, the Firefogg page should indicate that
as shown in Figure 8-16 .
Figure 8-16. The main Firefogg page
Click the “Make web video” link. In the next page, click the Select File button and then select the
Wildlife.wmv file as the input source. The page will load the file and display the details. In the format dropdown
you can choose either the WebM or Ogg format. Select the WebM format. In the Preset dropdown you can choose
the size of the video. The original file is 1280 x 720 and you can use that or choose a smaller size.
Click the Encode button and then browse to the Chapter 8 \Media folder. Click the Save button to create the
new file.
Creating an MP4 File
Firefogg will not create an MP4 file, which makes sense because Firefox doesn't support that format. The XMedia
Recode utility is a nice utility that supports lots of formats including MP4. However, I've found that these files