HTML 5 Video and Audio

HTML 5 promises to bring cross-platform, plugin free (no flash!) support to modern web browsers. While it is still a bit of a mess, much progress has been made. I attempted to use a degradable HTML 5 wordrpress plugin, so that visitors to this site could see content without the need for flash if their browsers supported it, but also have a way to fallback to flash for browsers that didn’t. You can see an example of this on my last post, here.

As I found though, this presents users with a non-uniform UI, doesn’t let me control preloading at all (it’s up to the browser’s implementation), doesn’t support full screen video always, and just doesn’t feel “slick”.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon an elegant solution, called SublimeVideo, which aims to rectify all these problems with a little bit of javascript. Wonderful! It’s not out yet, but the demos look gorgeous and provide all the functionality I’d ever need, all for free. I can’t wait!