ginger's thoughts

I am a very happy camper today! Not because of the New Year – well, yes, there are new opportunities and challenges for the New Year. But I’ve just received an email from Philip Jägenstedt announcing the New Year’s pre-alpha release of Opera 10.50 has HTML5 video support! Congratulations, Philip, congratulations Opera!

Opera’s HTML5 video support is based on using GStreamer, an open source multimedia framework used widely on Linux systems. On Linux, the Opera package will make sure you have GStreamer installed and thus provide HTML5 video support on all codecs that your GStreamer install supports. On other platforms, Opera will come packaged with a rudimentary version of GStreamer which provides only core codec support. Right now, that has only been done for Windows – I’m looking forward for the Mac version!

As core codecs, Opera has decided to support Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora and uncompressed WAVE PCM. This makes it the third browser to support Ogg Vorbis/Theora next to Firefox and Chrome and moves the balance in codec support in favor of open and royalty free codecs: three browsers to support Ogg Theora/Vorbis vs two browsers to support MPEG H.264/AAC.

It’s also cool to see Philips announcement of intending to support the W3C Media Fragments specification for directly addressing time offsets (and other fragments). This is probably related to the implementation of seeking, which is the same problem, technically. Lack of seeking is actually a bit annoying right now, since you cannot jump to time offsets in the video or find out how long the video without having played it through completely.

It’s also cool to see that Opera is on board with wanting to implement caption support. It has already started accessibility support for the video element with the following:

• you can tab onto the video controls: play/pause, transport bar, volume are tabbed to separately
• space bar toggles between play and pause when keyboard focus is on it
• when focused on the volume button, up/down arrow increases/decreases volume, space bar turns it on and off

I’m sure that once Opera has seeking support implemented, the transport bar will get improved and display progress, and also provide keyboard accessibility through being able to jump forwards and backwards with arrow key combinations.

Very nice work, Opera, and an awesome New Year’s present to the world!!