HTML5 Video

Two years and a half ago, Dan Connolly wrote about When will HTML 5 support <video>? Sooner if you help. Where are we with HTML5 Video nowadays?

ISSUE-6: Pros and cons of keeping video and audio in the scope of the HTML working group.

This issue has been closed. Video and audio are part of HTML5.

ISSUE-7: codec support and the <video> element

This issue has been closed due to lack of change proposal, so we still don't have a baseline video codec for HTML5. Dan mentioned Ogg/Theora, Dirac, H.264, and VC-1 back in 2007. With the recent announcement from the MS IE team to support H.264, we're down to two. Dirac didn't come up as a strong candidate so far. Well, at least, that's the status for the moment. Several individuals are wondering if the Google I/O conference this week will reveal some intent from Google regarding the VP8 codec.

We, at W3C, believe that having a video codec which is compatible with our Royalty-Free policy would be a great step forward, but we remain skeptical about the likelihood of such a thing happening. In the meantime, the HTML5 specification provides a nice fallback mechanism.

So, if there is new information on this subject, we could reopen ISSUE 7.

ISSUE-9: how accessibility works for <video> is unclear

That issue is still ongoing and it's still unclear how accessibility works for the video element. ISSUE-9 covers a wide scope, including providing more controls over multi-track media, access to media cues, captioning/video description support, etc. The HTML accessibility task force is still struggling to come up with a definite set of requirements (mainly due to lack of resources). The editor of the specification is working on a proposal. Somehow, we'll need to match them up together. We should get some good results within the upcoming weeks and extend or change the video element as necessary.

ISSUE-10: how similar should SMIL and <video> attribute names be?

This issue has been closed, due to lack of change proposal. There are certainly disagreements on the use cases in this area.

Implementations are moving along in the meantime. After Firefox, Google chrome, and Safari, Opera announced support for video in their products recently. The IE team is working on theirs as well. If you're wondering how well your browser supports HTML5 Video, check out HTML5 Video, Media Events and Media Properties. It's far from doing a thorough testing of the implementation but it gives you an idea of the support.