Is there a way to play video on a webpage with javascript without Flash Player ?
HTML5 will support video playback via the <video/> element. See here for more details, and here for implementation details.
You can always embed Windows Media, Real Player or QuickTime directly into your page. There's also Silverlight, if you're simply looking to avoid Flash. If you don't care how it looks, you can build a low quality player in Java. On some browsers, there's the HTML 5 video tag, but there's no real standardization on CODEC just yet.
There's always the poor man's alternative of just loading a bajillion individual frames as .gif/jpg/png and having javascript display them in sequence. It would be absolutely horrible for bandwidth and memory usage, and of course no audio, but it would (somewhat) simulate video being played.
Of course, on Windows platforms, you could use ActiveX and/or embed media player and play avi/wmv files as well, without ever touching flash.
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Is there any way to make .mp4 video work in all major browsers? I heard that videojs can help me but I am not sure. Will this library automatically set the flash as a callback if the video format is not supported for the browser? Has any used it before? Please help.
At one level you could probably say that mp4 will already work in most major browsers, but, unfortunately, things are not that simple.
mp4 is a 'container' and the video and audio in it may be encoded with various codecs which you will need to check your browser supports (most support h.264) and even the same codec using different settings (e.g. baseline vs mainline profiles).
There are also techniques to move the metadata to the start of the mp4 file to allow it stream immediately before the whole file has downloaded - without this it may appear that your video will not play (or it may even not play). See: http://multimedia.cx/eggs/improving-qt-faststart/
In fact it is probably possible to create an mp4 which will not play in any major browser.
As Keizom say's best current practice is to provide multiple sources of a video in formats that are known to work with current major browsers.
It's also worth nothing that the playing field keeps changing as browsers and video format evolve - for example a video player which used or fell back to Silverlight just a short time ago will now no longer work on some of the most popular browsers as they no longer support Silverlight.
To see the current picture you need to check some of the sites that are updated regularly in line with browser changes. Two good examples are:
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody/test.html
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_media_formats
You can still achieve this while allowing your users to upload just one format (this is what popular video hosting site do). You simply need to convert their uploaded video into the minimum set of formats you need to support the browser set you want to hit.
Note that if you are worried about quality of playback on different devices and with different network conditions then you may actually have to provide multiple bit rate versions of each video format (so the client can switch between bit rates as network conditions change).
Of course, this makes your server side more complicated and also uses a fair amount of computing power, so you need to decide if your use cases justifies this investment/effort.
Whether the .mp4 will "work" or not depends on the OS & browser. Cross-OS/browser support is achieved by supplying multiple sources.
<video>
<source src="foobar.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<!-- some other alternative sources -->
<source src="foobar.ogv" type="video/ogv" />
</video>
I'm working on a fairly simple mobile App, geared more towards people who may have trouble with technology. As such, it needs to be as easy to use as possible and I need to be able to play HTML5 audio/video files on start. The problem, as many of you may know, is that mobile devices tend to turn off Autoplay of video content for bandwidth purposes. I'm told there are ways around it using some mild scripting, but all the resources I've found seem to either be outdated, or unsuited to my needs. The development tool I'm using allows me to plug in HTML5 code, but I need to be able to plug in a video that will run without user input. It should also be noted that these video's must be hosted online somewhere (ie, It cant have the video load from inside the app).
Any Help you could give me on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
You didn't specify OS or device or browser. It's been a long time and you probably don't care anymore but if anyone else comes past this, my answer.
Try placing "playsinline" inside the video tag.
Eg. <video playsinline> </video>
I can confirm this works in iOS 10.
I have an .mov file that is too long to upload to YouTube. I want to put it up in essentially a YouTube player but have the video be self-hosted. Can anyone recommend an easy way to do this and make it cross-browser compatible?
Sublime Video is going to be an awesome HTML5 player someday!
A flash player is okay, flowplayer and jwplayer are usable.
Vimeo also hosts videos!
.mov just isn't that friendly for the web.
YouTube already has a HTML5 mode (which you have to opt into though) which I assume means they convert the videos themselves. It's worth checking out, but as I mentioned, each user has to opt into using the HTML5 mode so it's probably not worth it.
If you're going to host it yourself, I'd suggest converting it to OGG and MP4 (and possibly WEBM) and playing it through the MediaElementJS player.
I am a little new to embedding videos on a website. What is the best way to go about it? I just started reading up on it.
I read that I should use HTML5 and the browser's native player. -- Does anyone know of a javascript library that will use the browser's player and detect if the browser is not using HTML5 to downgrade to a flash player?
As far as encoding what is the best approach? I am planning on writing a little console app to use FFMPEG to convert the videos. But what encoding should I use? I heard H.264 is promising? But
This is what you're looking for: http://videojs.com/
Encoding wise, I think H.264 and WebM is a wise choice. That way you'll satisfy all modern browsers and mobile devices (incl. iOS and Android), and only fall back to Flash for older, pre-HTML5 browsers (and FF 3.6, which only supports Theora.)
The DIY approach would be to use the Video For Everybody embed code. That will lead with HTML5 video and fallback to flash.
Then for video encoding, you can use FFmpeg like you said.
To make your life easier, you should check out VideoJS for your HTML5 video player. It handles a lot of cross browser issues and some extra features that browsers don't support yet.
For video encoding, if you're planning to use FFmpeg specifically for automating encoding, you should check out Zencoder's video encoding API. It could save you some set up time and compatibility issues.
For codecs, #1 priority should be h.264, specifically using the baseline profile so it will work on smartphones. After that, ogg and webm are both good choices. WebM is higher quality for file size, but Ogg can be viewed by way more users because older version of Firefox support it. And just to note, if you only do h.264, the Video For Everybody code won't fallback to Flash in Firefox and Opera (that don't support h.264) so you'll need to use a player like VideoJS.
Use Handbrake for video encoding, especially for HTML 5 support.
HTML 5 is an awesome way of embedding video, however it hasn't been standardized yet. You definitely want to use it if you're supporting iOS devices, as they of course don't support Flash which is the most mainstream way of embedding video.
HTML5 is pretty awesome because this is how simple it is:
<video src="video.m4v" />
Here is a fantastic link you will find useful:
http://www.robwalshonline.com/posts/tutorial-serving-html5-video-cross-browser-including-ipad/
I read that I should use HTML5 and the
browser's native player
Which idiot told you that? Given that you will loose out on a significant portion of the client population you either run a monoculture of HTML 5 browsers, of whoever said that should be serving burgers at McDonalds, not give advice to people. HTML 5 and the integrated player are nice, but not there yet for the general public. In a couple of years, yes. Now - if I hire a web company for putting videos on a website and they do that, they get sued for gross neglect and incompetence.
Today, playback is mostly flash - that has a high penetration. A flash video player is also what sites like youtube currently use. If you go for less (penetration), Silverlight is very good and has the complete backend infrastructure.
I heard H.264 is promising?
So what? FIRST you need to fix the playback side, then you use whatever format is most efficient given your playback decision.
My application is written in Adobe Air & JavaScript and doesn't use Flash/Flex.
Air.Sound() is used to play (shoutcast) audio streams.
I'm looking for a solution (without using external Flash/Flex players, coz) that can preload (buffer) a few second of audio stream to avoid playback lags and keeping memory usage low.
As far as I know Air 2.5 added Audio and Video html5 tags.
For shoutcast and html 5 audio see this question
Edit: Apparently AIR left out the audio/video tags (because they are an alternative to flash and you get flash on AIR - the way adobe looks at it). So I think the answer is you can't do it without flash. Even if it had the audio tag you'd most probably need to tweak the output streams from the server.