[theora] Seamless web video within reach

[Denver Gingerich]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 6:38 PM, Gregory Maxwell<gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Denver Gingerich<denver at ossguy.com> wrote:
>> Ok, fair enough.  But to keep the simplicity of the solution I
>> described (<video> plus JavaScript include), we'll need it hosted on
>> some central FQDN that designers (through mv_embed) can refer to.  So
>> we will need the Cortado applet to be CA-signed.
>
> Perhaps. But that means a warning.
>
> My own view is that the warning is a complete non-starter. Computer
> professionals spend a lot of time telling users to click NO to those
> warnings.

I was under the impression that a CA-signed applet wouldn't require
user interaction, but I guess I'm wrong (can others confirm?).  That
does make my solution a little less easy to use for web designers.

> If a user is going to blissfully click yes, we might as well swap out
> their OS for some linux distro. ;)

Ideally, yes.  But that's beyond the scope of my blog post. :)

>>> Java works pretty widely on IE. Okay, lets say 20% it doesn't work on.
>>
>> 20% of 60% still gives us 12% of all Internet users that can't play
>> Theora.  That's pretty big and not very competitive with Flash
>> deployment.  This is the main reason I'm hoping to get the VLC ActiveX
>> control in better shape.
>
> 12% that can't play without installing something.  Same boat for VLC
> activeX really.

Isn't an ActiveX control as easy to install/use as a Java applet?  Or
is it more involved?

> Arguably development resources would be better spent creating a flash
> wrapper for libtheora (compiled to flashvm using alchemy).

I had considered that, though it seemed impractical until you
mentioned Alchemy.  That would be worth looking.  Unfortunately, Adobe
doesn't support it and could make Flash start ignoring it at any time.

> This has been done for vorbis already:
> http://mauft.com/2009/651/alchemy-ogg-vorbis-frontend
>
> It would result in Ogg/Theora compatibility being ≈ flash.

That would be good.

> There is also vorbis in csharp for silverlight... Theora is in
> development but clearly has a long way to go. This may be a better
> option to long term install-free IE support.

This might be worth looking at once Silverlight becomes more
widely-deployed.  I'm guessing it's on less than 80% of Windows
systems.

Denver
http://ossguy.com/