BROWSER PLAYBACK OF FOSS CODECS
From Transmission
Project Overview
I was looking at Firefox today and blah blah blah....
Project Workspace
Embedded Video
Research question: What would be required within various systems to implement cortado applet or another embedded FOSS streaming video solution?
Cortado Applet
Cortado is working, and implemented into Indytube. This patch should be documented and promoted, with a "recipe" for implementation into other CMSs, or links to the video.module on Drupal, and Plumi on Plone.
Problem with Cortado is that due to the fact that the user must run a Java runtime environment, the emulation produces latency in the player.
More testing/documentation of this should follow.
mediaWiki extension for embedded media, good overview of embed video issues
vPIP - video Play in Place
Cortado
Drupal support for Ogg Theora using Cortado
Metavid
Standalone package of script UCSC use to embed ogg theora into web pages using Cortado
Browser Plugins
Firefox Plugins
The plugin for VLC needs to be tested some more. Has errors on some platforms.
Problem with Plumi and VLC is that the Ogg files need to be streamed in order to circumvent the issue of having to load the files completely before playing back in the browser when using http.
Run a test using Icecast to stream Ogg files on EngageMedia test server. Plumi could add Icecast functionality for Ogg files, and then use the vPIP javascript play in place code to launch the VLC plugin or provoke a download of the plugin.
osx plugins for Firefox - no VLC/Annodex mentioned
VLC Firefox plugin
VLC Plugin Development Tracker - Mozilla Plugin Tickets
Actual VLC plugin for Firefox Mac osX
Annodex Firefox extension
Annodex has developed Firefox plugin
Opera wants to have Ogg Theora plugin, work with Firefox
Opera plugin/native support
Interview with Opera re. video element and Ogg
Demo of Opera native video support
VLC plugin
list of non-installer package of VLC to find plugin
forum topic where above process and other VLC plugin issues are discussed
actual ticket related to Firefox crash using VLC plugin - apparently now fixed
Extending Indytube with the open source Icecast2 stream server
EngageMedia has done work to implement the Indytube flash transcoding and playback module into EngageMedia/Plumi.
We also explored the possibility of extending Indytube to handle Ogg files instead. The server-side transcoding may be handled using ffmpeg2theora and serving of these Ogg files may be done using the IceCast2 server.
Experimental Development
We have done work to test and implement ogg/theora streaming using IceCast2. This server was setup to serve the ogg files transcoded by ffmpeg2theora directly from the directory structure as maintained by indytube. This configuration is quite straightforward, and can be done
ogg with icecast
vlc plugin - vpip
problem with ogg is that it does not work with vpip - no progressive download
so... look into streaming ogg in order to provide decent file to vlc plugin
Extending Indytube with Cortado for Ogg playback
describe cortado, describe test of implementation into EngageMedia/Indytube, describe findings - cortado not worth investing in long-term due to other options being preferable and latency due to being a java applet
The test of Cortado was done by making Indytube generate html snippets to insert the java applet into the "video view" page as generated by our Plone based CMS. Cortado is not currently as user-friendly as FlowPlayer, and being written in Java, is slower at decoding video.
indytube cortado
problems with cortado - emulation produces latency
... not much to do here other than make a page about it,
possibly release template and indytube together as a product
MetaVid method for embedded Ogg Playback
Investigate the recommendation of this script for Transmission members as a solution that incorporates the use of both the Cortado applet and the VLC plugin if it is available in the client browser.
http://metavid.ucsc.edu/wiki/index.php/Mv_embed
HTML 5 - <video> element
The video element is being discussed for implementation into the new HTML 5 specification. This would enable native video support in web browsers, without the need for applets or plugins.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-video
(page gives errors)
There is currently a fight going on about whether or not to recommend a Ogg Theora/Vorbis as the baseline codec to be supported in new generation browsers using HTML 5.
The WHATWG group (explain who) are.... There are members of this group who are very pro-Ogg, but there are other members such as Apple who are not. Apple wish to support their own version of the H.264 codec instead.
There are advocates for WMV, H264, Flash etc. as a standard codec to support.
This has been remarked on the WHATWG as an opening for Microsoft to include WMV as *their* standard video codec, which would have the tendency to push out all other video codecs given the popularity of Windows/IE.
It is uncertain how much support HTML 5 will even have in new generations of browsers. And uncertain if the video element will definitely make it into the standard, and whether or not Ogg Theora/Vorbis will be given native support in the video element.
List archives here: http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-June/thread.html
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2007/03/05/1 blogpost about Opera's decision to support Ogg Theora in video element
Native Firefox Support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis
There is some experimental work being done to play Ogg in Firefox natively using the <video> element:
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/05/support-for-html-video-element-in.html
This is where the patch will appear:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382267
Native Opera Support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis
IRC Channel for Theora
- theora on freenode
wikimedia Ogg video
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bigeye_trevally.ogg
Wikimedia uses the Ogg video format. It apparently checks for the <video> element (beta version of Opera only at this point?) then VLC plugin (i think, check...) then uses Cortado applet.
HTML 5
http://ajaxian.com/by/topic/html/ announcement Opera, Safari and Mozilla will adopt draft and work on it
http://olpc.tv/2007/06/01/opera-browser-and-ogg-theora-in-html5-specs/ one laptop per child interviews Opera and shows it running with Ogg theora
