Having fun with HTML5

October 8th, 2009 7:10 pm

Yesterday’s post is the very first one on this blog that featured multimedia pieces other than images.  As a part media geek and a part web geek, I converted the site’s underlying technology from XHTML1.0 to HTML5.  It’s been fun exploring this area of technology that’s new to me.

My testing ground is same as always – Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and iPhone.

Firefox 3.0, Opera 10, IE 7, IE 8

No support for <audio> tag.  I heard Opera’s had <audio> and <video> support for two years or so in their experimental builds, but the support is still lacking in the public release.  It’s a shame.

Firefox 3.5

<audio> tag is supported.  It supports ogg vorbis playback.  The interface features play/pause button, mute button, playback pasition bar, current time, and total time.  It’s a bit of bleh looking.

audio_tag_firefox_win

When I tried to load mp3 file, this is what I got:

audio_tag_firefox_win2

Google Chrome

Support is same as Firefox – no mp3 support.  Maybe it does support mp4/AAC.  I’ll check it out later.  The interface is somewhat similar to that of Firefox, but missing the total time indication.  Also, it has no indication that a particular media is not supported for a playback, e.g. mp3.  When I tried to load mp3, the player looked virtually the same.

audio_tag_chrome_win

Safari on Windows

Safari does not support ogg vorbis playback.  It does handle mp3.  The player interface is nice and slick, but is missing any type of time indicator.  It looks exactly like the QuickTime plug-in on other browsers, with different color scheme.  Also, like Chrome, it does not have any indication about unsupported format when trying to load ogg vorbis.

audio_tag_safari_win

Mobile Safari on iPhone

I was a bit shocked that Mobile Safari’s support of <audio> format.  Just like the Windows version, it does not handle ogg vorbis.  It does, however, have an indicator for unsupported content.  The indicator was so tiny that I had to zoom in a LOT to be able to see the difference.  When the button is clicked, the standard iPhone video player is opened, and music is loaded and played on that.  I have better impression of <audio> tag handling on Mobile Safari than on Windows.

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