Greetings to you all!
I want to develop an application that would be able to hold web conference without the users having to download any installable files. After doing some research I have found that flash is perhaps the only option I might have as JMF needs access to registries.
I would like to know if you have any suggestions.
Is it possible to use RTSP with HTML5 to develop the required application.
P.S The application shall be free for all, so I hope you would take the pain to answer. Thanks in advance!
In theory, yes, but is it browser specific.
HTML 5's <video> tag is protocol agnostic—it will not care what you have there. You place the protocol in the src attribute as part of the URL. E.g.:
<video src="rtp://myserver.com/path/to/stream">
Your browser does not support the VIDEO tag and/or RTP streams.
</video>
The problem is that the implementation of the <video> tag is browser specific. Since it is still early days for HTML 5, I expect frequently changing support (or lack of support).
And then you still have to worry about browser specific CODEC support! Flash is, at least today, the "more universal" approach--you'll cover a larger percentage of the web browsing public.
My suggestion is to either
User Flex/Flash
Become an expert on web browsers and enjoy coding on the bleeding edge
Related
I can't watch Periscope without flash:
Since Periscope is pretty new and hype I find it a pity flash is required. My best guess then is that they simply can't.
But what is the technical restriction if one?
I can't say for sure about their own technical restrictions but they are serving the video in chunks of .ts files. It is not impossible for HTML5-based player to handle MPEG-TS streams so I can only assume this is a temporary solution.
Example of an HTML5 player handling .ts format is THEOPlayer. Also DailyMotion released an open-source JavaScript HLS streaming client. If others can already do it now, Twitter will do it soon.
Why Flash? :
It's an easy solution that works same on all browsers that it's installed onto so Edge, Chrome, Safari & Firefox etc so it will each give a consistent result to their user base without specific browser limitations (since it's a plugin).
Why assume temporary? :
First of all as you said it's still new (growing/developing). They have a few job openings for video programmers. This particular job opening requires "Ability to create an interface in HTML, CSS and JavaScript". They are currently using a Flash-based JW Player instead of a custom-made Twitter player. That will change in time.
As I'm a bit out of tune with web programming I tried to look up what is currently being used in order to display static video files on a web page.
After google showed me either the video tag for PC or some programs for android,... I'm wondering what are really now the current methods to display such videos? Is it JUST the video tag nowadays? Or are there also other methods that are "modern"?
The latest versions of the most popular browsers already support the video tag, so it should be as modern as you expect. The problem here is rather the video format. Each browser supports different formats for different types of operating systems, so this is one thing you should pay attention for. This website should give you a quick view of the current situation.
One more thing I can point you to is the support for older browsers. You should check if user's browser support the video tag and your video's encoding. In case it doesn't -- simply add a fallback to some older technology, such as flash or something else.
I want to make a single web application avoiding any flash code. This application must contain videoconference, and I want to implement it in pure HTML5. It is possible? I know about websockets, but don't know really if videoconference can be implemented through them with a relative performance (at least, 24fps + sound at a right resolution, minimum 640x480), and both endpoints being web apps (both endpoints should use browser).
Thanks in advance
Anyone following up this question - on Feb 4th, 2013 they produced the solution with WEBRTC in Chrome and Firefox. For examples see https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-calling/ or http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/ or https://code.google.com/p/sipservlets/wiki/HTML5WebRTCVideoApplication
You can't really use HTML5 video for live streaming at the moment, and it doesn't have support for web cams yet.
Ericsson has modyfied a WebKit browser and is showing how this can be done with hopfully upcoming HTML5 Stream API. See Beyond HTML5 - Implementing and stream management in WebKit
It is impossible to capture web-cam images/microphone feed just through JavaScript (although there are plug-ins which let you handle output through flash), so it would be necessary for you to have some kind of application/plug-in installed.
The speed part is just for the client to worry. I mean, web sockets will be as fast as the connection permits.
You should do some research about web workers, since they would be very useful for speeding up your application (you could have microphone interface, web-cam interface and UI all with their particular worker, thus never blocking the application or rendering it unresponsive).
EDIT: the aforementioned jQuery plug-in works through the use of <canvas>.
As Jonas said, according to the situations now, we can't build video conference with HTML5. There are many limitations with browsers also. As there is no common video codec supported by all browsers. And live-streaming is also properly supported by safari only(using HTML5 video tag). As per my experience we can't build live-streaming on windows with any browser properly.
But if you wanna get some information about live streaming see https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StreamingMediaGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html
you can use this source to test your live-streaming examples
"http://xfunoonx.api.channel.livestream.com/3.0/playlist.m3u8"
This content will work only with safari on Mac.
So I am having a web application with domian "www.example.com" that needs to serve audio from "www.example2.com", but for some reason this is not working (the audio just does not stream)
<audio src="http://www.example2.com/song.mp3" controls preload></audio>
Given that if I put the sound source url directly into the browser the audio will be available
Anyone tried this? thanks
Wa'el
Apparently I cannot vote up CyberK's response (don't have the reputation yet to do so) but I agree with him. You cannot do <audio> or <video> cross-domain. I have tried this exact thing on both Chrome and Firefox. There are more than a couple of articles about this. Finding this out for myself today; not happy with the restriction.
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/11/video-audio-and-cross-domain-usage.html
I think HTML5 does not allow you to take a source from another hosting provider / server. Maybe it's limited to your domain but I'm not 100% sure... I do remind that there was a little limitation about this html5 element...
You would need to do some tests but I reckon that it does work, but you may have difficulties with certain actions and queries
Example, you may be able to start/pause/stop but not check the title or the length since that could be a form of XSS
FF and Chrome do not support it, but the IE11 do.
I think W3C should have an solution about cross domain, after all it is a completely reasonable request.
I want so serve some videos on my site. They are available as .MP4 files gotten from a FlipShare camera.
Now I tried converting them to WMV (which succeeded, but when embedded in html in a <object id='mediaPlayer' width='320' height='285' classid='CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95' etc' tag, users have to install an addon and the user experience of 10 Windows Media Players on the site isn't just so good.)
So then I looked at youtube and wondered how they do it, but I can't figure out what format they convert the video to.
So my question is: What format do I have to convert my video to, to show it in a player which does not need to be installed in the users browser. What tool do i need and what is the html code to embed such a video?
As you can see: starting from scratch.
PS: I often hear: This or that file extension is just a container, there can be anything inside. If you're using this in your answer, can you explain this to me, because I never understood this. For me a .cs is a c# file and a .doc a Word file, and not 'a container'.
This isn't an easy question. The basic answer is that you need to use a format that the user's computer already supports. There is no one answer to this question. YouTube encodes videos as MP4 and embeds them in the page with a Flash-based movie player, and Flash is pretty widely supported, but you'll notice that Flash isn't available on a lot of mobile platforms — so anybody using an iPhone is shut out if you go the Flash route.
HTML5 introduces the video tag, which is meant to solve this problem once and for all, but there's still a hiccup even there — most HTML5-enabled browsers support h.264-encoded video, but Mozilla supports Ogg Theora instead. YouTube is currently experimenting with a <video>-based player, so this does seem like the future.
I believe the current best practice to support the most people possible is to encode as h.264, try to serve as a <video> element, and have a Flash-based player as a fallback if that doesn't work (which can play the same h.264 file).
I'd say the most popular solution at the moment - utilized by YouTube and other major video portals - is H.264 encoded Flash-based Video. Flash can play Video since... I think Version 8 or 9, and has since gained significant market share.
My personal favourite Flash player is LongTail Player, but it isn't free for commercial use.
Here's a SO question with a list of Flash based players including open source ones.
Flash won't play on iPhone and iPad, though.
If you want to support computers with Flash Player 9 (I've seen some around, but I don't have any hard numbers) you will need to encode FLV files (which use a codec named Sorenson I think).
The upcoming alternative is HTML 5 Video but suport for that in browsers is nowhere near a major market share.
This question requires a re-answer now that it's no longer 2010 and HTML5 videos (as utilized by most video hosting sites) and chunk-based videos (sent as responses to periodic XHR requests - as utilized by Youtube) are the norm. While there is no best way to add video to your site, Flash is definitely nowhere close to even being good as of the time of writing of this answer.
The simple un-researched answer is: Just use a video tag and it'll work out!
This is simple and intuitive, and should work fine in many of your use-cases.
The researched answer is: Unfortunately, upload the video on Youtube and embed it on your site.
The pros and cons of embedding on Youtube over just having a video tag:
The pros:
Allows you to offer your video in a multitude of qualities.
Very bandwidth efficient. Youtube is bandwidth efficient for your users since it reencodes videos, and is also bandwidth efficient for you since you'll no longer be serving your videos off your own hosting.
Offers features like closed captions, automatic subs, playing at multiple speeds, full screen player, etc.
The cons:
It's a very heavily monetized service, chances are they'll want to put ads on your video if any of its content isn't 100% originally yours.
It has very strict laws/terms and conditions that you need to adhere to, at least in my opinion.
It tracks your users. If your application requires privacy and you can't rely on your users to protect themselves, then Youtube isn't ideal.
Other alternatives that mix the pros and cons of those two options are:
Using a Javascript video library to get HTML5 video along with some of the pros of using youtube, but none of its cons.
Using FFMPEG on the server side, for bandwidth issues.
Using some CDN that supports video to deliver the video, for reliability and bandwidth issues. My current favorites are ones that rely on service workers and the bittorent protocol, to stream from users to each other, but whether that suits you or not depends on your application.
Using AWS storage services to store the video, and AWS gateway/CDN services to serve it, which might be a great solution cost-wise and efficiency-wise if you don't want youtube but don't want to store videos on whatever infrastructure is serving your website.
Sources of this answer: Personal experience. As much as I didn't want to answer from experience, this question really needed a new answer! Feel free to edit it with something more concrete.
Converting your video MPEG-4 with H.264 will get you 97% coverage on current browsers across desktop and mobile, although some Android devices don't support hardware acceleration for this format. To address that you could also serve WebM with VP9 codec.
I wrote up a summary of browser support that might be useful: https://stuartk.com/posts/whats-the-best-html-video-format-to-serve/