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[park]

Looks pretty nice. Is there a way you could embed an audio player in there as well. It would be great to be able to play these files inside Chrome or Firefox.

Flowplayer is an open source flash player with javascript configuration, that supports playlists.

[gvanbrunt]

Just a suggestion but HTML 5 is the way to go. Flash is dead even at Adobe and MS is pushing out browsers as critical updates so most people will have a compatible browser soon.

It seems to be the least common denominator. You can't support everything so it might as well be something most users have an is forward looking.

Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk

[glynor]

Flowplayer is an open source flash player with javascript configuration, that supports playlists.

We use Flowplayer on our website at work, and our web developer has slowly learned to despise it.  It is easy to do basic customization with, but anything advanced is tough.  And, according to him, the playlist support is basically broken.

Just a suggestion but HTML 5 is the way to go.

Totally agree.  JWPlayer is available in a HTML5 version.

We're trying to switch over to JWPlayer.

[MrC]

A few test implementations.

[Hendrik]

I suggested switching to HTML5 streaming before, however as Matt pointed out back then, there are some technical challenges to solve.

For one, sadly the choice which codec to use is not trivial. H264 would be my first thought, however its not supported by all browsers (in fact, only very few). Ogg Theora or WebM/VP8 would be the best choice with broader support, both work with most browsers, only IE needs some help.
In addition to the codec choice, apparently doing a live encoding and streaming seems to be challenging for most container formats, although i would hope doing it with WebM should be possible. Apparently doing this with FLV was rather easy.

[gvanbrunt]

however its not supported by all browsers

Yes (thanks to Google surprisingly) h.264 never ended up being supported by all browsers. However, MS (of all companies) has a plug in for Chrome. If you are "smart" enough to use Chrome, I think you can find the plug in. h.264 works in Safari and Mozilla does it not? It was supposed to last time I checked but I haven't done web development in a while.

It really ticks me off that Google did that and they haven't changed course. They are hurting compatibility for everyone. Instead of moving on to things like adaptive streaming developers are still spinning their wheels over which codec to use. Lets stick it to them...

[Hendrik]

Yes (thanks to Google surprisingly) h.264 never ended up being supported by all browsers. However, MS (of all companies) has a plug in for Chrome. If you are "smart" enough to use Chrome, I think you can find the plug in. h.264 works in Safari and Mozilla does it not? It was supposed to last time I checked but I haven't done web development in a while.

Actually, its technically not googles fault. They supported H264 at first in Chrome. They posted a blog entry that its supposed to be removed again in the future to endorse free and open standards, however i dont know if that happened yet.
The worse thing is that Firefox does not support it, mainly for the same reasons, because Mozilla does not want to buy into the big commercial standard. With Mozilla already refusing, Google couldn't have changed it either way.

WebM/VP8 on the other hand work in all browsers, just IE needs a plugin (only works in IE9, though)

[gvanbrunt]

So H.264 must be licensed?

Edit:
Just did some reading and it appears that h.264 licensing was dropped, so this isn't a really good excuse for Google and Mozilla. At any rate it doesn't do much good to discuss the merits of that decision here, so I'll stick to some suggestions for Matt etc from here on out.

Matt:
The screen shots look pretty good. The other way to do HTML 5 I guess is via browser detection and encode to either h.264 or VP8 depending on the browser.

[glynor]

Ogg Theora or WebM/VP8 would be the best choice with broader support, both work with most browsers, only IE needs some help.

That's dangerous from a patent perspective.

Despite what Google would have you believe, WebM/VP8 is almost certainly subject to most of the same patents as H.264, but there is no existing license pool where uses like this have been licensed royalty free (like H.264 has been).  So, you could get sued by a patent troll and be on the hook for a bunch of money.  Of course, that could probably happen in a huge variety of places with any software package so maybe it isn't worth even fretting about.

It also doesn't work on Mobile Safari, which would have to be one of the primary targets for this system.

[JimH]

That's dangerous from a patent perspective.
... Of course, that could probably happen in a huge variety of places with any software package so maybe it isn't worth even fretting about.

I've pretty much given up staying out of jail now.  It's only a matter of time.

[glynor]

I've pretty much given up staying out of jail now.  It's only a matter of time.

 

If you didn't listen to it, seriously go listen to the "When Patents Attack" episode of This American Life right now.  Depressing and eye opening.  It is only going to get worse.

[Matt]

If you didn't listen to it, seriously go listen to the "When Patents Attack" episode of This American Life right now.  Depressing and eye opening.  It is only going to get worse.

I think patent law can be summed up by the golden rule: those with the gold make the rules.

[Hendrik]

That's dangerous from a patent perspective.

Many things are.
I wonder if, for example, JRiver licensed their AAC decoder, among other things? (Just thinking about AAC here because VLC recently got a letter regarding AAC licensing. :p)

My own filters include decoders for a multitude of patented formats, if i were to think about that i could probably never sleep again. :p