HTML5 Video, Minus Ogg - Fixing Firefox Video Problems

That of Mozilla’s Firefox not supporting the de-facto standard H264 video format is a well known problem many people wrote about recently. I think John made the best analysis of the situation, depicting the absurd situation Mozilla is throwing itself into by supporting the .ogg format, together with Opera. From the post:

“So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.”

Whether Mozilla will finally understand that H264 is the format to support it’s unknown to us, but - technically speaking - there are some problems that Philip Hutchison over at Pipwerks tried to fix with a simple script. Indeed, Firefox does support the HTML5 tag, but the linked video file should be encoded in .ogg rather than H264. As Philip writes:

“Firefox is essentially forcing people to offer two versions of each video: an Ogg version and an MP4 version. In my opinion — and the opinion of many others — this simply will not do. Providing two different video files is not realistic, Ogg’s quality is inferior to H.264, and many computers and mobile devices have direct hardware support for H.264 but not Ogg. Firefox’s HTML5 video is rendered useless.”

The problem is, Firefox 3.6 knows it can’t play an MP4 file but it loads the element anyway, just because it’s a supported tag. This script will detect if HTML5 is supported, see if it’s Firefox who tries to open it and if so, the video element is deleted and the flash fallback stays there.

But all in all, if Mozilla really wants to stay in the market and keep a good slice of the market share, they need to accept standards and stop rambling about openness with unsupported, inferior formats. I think openness is when you support something widely accepted as a high quality standard, and not when you stick with license-free but unpopular or even closed formats.