Theora Video Backend for Firefox Landed

It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So <video> and <audio> will support those codecs built into Firefox itself. Chris Blizzard posted about this earlier.

The backend has been committed to the main Mozilla source code and is enabled by default. You can download nightly builds and test it out. An example of a live site that uses <video> is the Wikimedia video archive.

This original commit is a work in progress. There are unimplemented bits, bugs, etc that need to be sorted out. But it's a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release.

In other news, getting out of Whistler, where the summit is being held, is somewhat of an issue at the moment...

Categories: mozilla, video

Video Bling

Robert O'Callahan has been posting about his 'bling branch' which contains some very nice effects. See his blog posts for more detail:

• Fun
• SVG Paint Servers for HTML
• Using Arbitary Elements as Paint Servers

As soon as I saw these I had to try the effects with a playing video. The video patches apply fine to the svg-integration branch.

The screencast below is from this special build, displaying a video played using <video>. There is a reflection below it using the tricks from Robert's posts. Shortly after that I change to a video playing that uses an SVG filter for edge detection when I mouse over the video. Finally there is a video with both effects combined.

You can download the video_bling.ogg file to play, or if you have a <video> enabled browser you can see it below. I've also uploaded it to YouTube.



Categories: firefox, video

The Video and Audio element patch has landed

The patches in bug 382267 to add support for the WHATWG video and audio elements have been applied to the Firefox mozilla-central repository.

This means you can get the source for Firefox and build it with support for <video> and <audio> by using the configure flag '--enable-media'. Currently the media support is disabled by default so it won't appear in the nightly builds. At some point this will be changed and it will be enabled by default.

The patch that has landed does not yet include a backend decoder. It won't play any videos as a result. That will be fixed when the various backends are landed:

• Ogg Theora and Vorbis
• GStreamer
• DirectShow
• QuickTime

In the meantime you can apply the patches from those bugs to the mozilla-central source to get a video build that decodes video.

Categories: firefox, ogg, gstreamer, video