Wowza Community

Play mp4 in html 5 browser without plugin

Hi,

Is there a possibility to stream mp4 file to browser that supports html5 natively (IE9, for instance) without flash or silverlight plugin? Something like http streaming to iphone safari browser.

Thanks,

Alex

As far as I know, it will only work in Safari on Mac Snow Leopard or higher.

Richard

Not at present in any browser that I know of.

Richard

Thanks,

The question is - will video tag play rtmp stream?

Actually, along with Chrome (temporarily) and Mobile Safari, IE9 will play embedded h.264 encoded, mp4 container video using the built in html 5

Where you run in to trouble is with Firefox, and soon Chrome (desktop and mobile) too. Firefox isn’t going to support h.264 embedded in html 5 at all, on the grounds that while it may be currently free it is patent-encumbered technology. Google is dropping support for h.264 in Chrome for the same reason. In Google’s case, they are pushing the WebM container, with VP-8 encoded video. Firefox sides with Theora. Google may gain some traction since they can leverage their huge reach, and Youtube, to push WebM support, but I don’t think Firefox is going to get anywhere with their strategy beyond making a lot of open source zealots happy.

Ironically, what this fracturing of html 5 video support has done is push things right back to Adobe Flash - the very thing they are all trying to get away from :slight_smile: All browsers (except, of course, iOS and certain other mobile devices) support Flash plugins, and Flash has such huge market penetration that the commonly accepted strategy right now is to offer up a Flash player for embedded video, with html 5 fallback for devices that don’t support it (but do support h.264). The current versions of JW Player and FlowPlayer both have this fallback support built in.

Right now, to get the “most compatible” video, you should go with h.264, baseline, AAC audio, 2 channel, 44khz, in an mp4 container. That kind of file will play in anything that supports Flash (10.x and up) or html 5/h.264, which is a huge number of devices. There’s other small tweaks to like key frame size but that’s all part of the fun, right?

Then there’s stuff like the Blackberries which have such terrible, inconsistent embedded video support they are almost not worth dealing with.