[theora] Seamless web video within reach

[Denver Gingerich]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Christopher
Blizzard<blizzard at mozilla.com> wrote:
> I would much rather see us implement a plugin for IE that implements the
> <video> tag with Theora support.  We did something like this for
> <canvas> and it worked pretty well.  i.e.:
>
> http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/08/mozilla-drags-ie-into-the-future-with-canvas-element-plugin.ars

That seems like quite a reasonable solution.  However, the above link
suggests the <canvas> control user experience was a bit of a
nightmare:

"Currently, the experience is pretty crappy: you have to click through
an infobar to allow installation of this component, then you have to
click 'Yes' to say that you really want to run the native content, and
then you have to click 'Yes' again to allow the component to interact
with content on the page."

Do you know if this has been fixed (ie. with code signing)?  I think
that would be a necessary prerequisite before investing time in any
ActiveX control (VLC or otherwise).  Similar issues are described by
the VLC people here:

http://wiki.videolan.org/ActiveX#Introduction

I think this can be solved with the Freemail CA that I described
earlier [1], which can be found by searching for "Freemail" on this
page:

http://www.dallaway.com/acad/webstart/

Testing/developing on Windows is very inconvenient for me so I haven't
tried it out.  Assuming this sort of signing is required for ideal UX,
can someone give it a shot and tell us how it goes?

Denver
http://ossguy.com/


1. http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora-dev/2009-July/003951.html