HTML5 and CSS3, Second Edition

Figure 24—Captions as displayed by Video.js

It’s a lot of work to build up caption files for your videos, but it makes things

much easier for the hearing impaired. It’s also nice for situations in which

your viewers don’t have audio, like in an office environment or a library. Best

of all, thanks to Video.js, you have a great fallback solution that you can start

using right now.

Limitations of HTML5 Video

HTML5 video has a few obstacles to overcome before it’s usable everywhere.

First, HTML5 video has no provisions for streaming the video files. Users have

become accustomed to being able to seek to a specific part of a video. Flash-

based video players excel at this because of the amount of effort Adobe has

put into Flash as a video-delivery platform. To seek with HTML5 video, the

file must be downloaded completely on browsers. This may change in time.

Second, there’s no way to manage rights. Sites such as Hulu that want to

prevent piracy of their content can’t rely on HTML5 video. Flash remains a

viable solution for these situations.

Finally, and most importantly, the process of encoding videos is costly and

time-consuming. The need to encode in multiple formats makes HTML5 video

much less attractive. For that reason, you see many sites supplying video in

the patent-encumbered H.264 format so that it can be played on the widest

range of devices using a combination of the HTML5 video tag and Flash.

These issues aren’t going to derail HTML5, but they are things to be aware

of before we can use HTML5 video to replace Flash as a video-delivery vehicle.

7.3 The Future

First-class audio support in the browser opens up a ton of possibilities for

developers. JavaScript web applications can easily trigger sound effects and

alerts without our having to use Flash to embed the audio. Native video

Chapter 7. Embedding Audio and Video • 148

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