Lynda HTML5 For Flash Developers

So in this chapter, you've seen that you can now do some pretty basic audio and video directly

in the browser using HTML5, but let's look at kind of where things are going, because

again, this specifications are changing pretty rapidly.

Currently today, you need both Flash and HTML5 to reach all browsers and that's going to

be the case for quite a while moving forward.

The fact of the matter is, Flash doesn't run on iOS in the browser, so if you want to have

a video that plays in the browser, on let's say, the iPad, well you have to use HTML5.

If you want to deploy your video to people that are not using the very latest browsers,

you're going to need to have a fallback to Flash, so there's multiple ways in which you can do it.

You can choose to deliver Flash first and then fall back to an HTML5 video, or you can

do the opposite, you can actually have an HTML5 video as your main preference with a

fallback to Flash.

And really quickly, how you would implement something like that, you can see here I have

my video tag and inside the video tag I have my two source elements one for an MP4, one

for an OGV file for Firefox, and below that I have my alternate content and this can be

where you actually embed your SWF file to playback that video.

And again, that's the similar type of techniques available if you want to, say, choose Flash

first and if that's not available, you can choose the HTML5 video.

So the reality is that today HTML5 is good for simple audio and video playback, and again,

like I have mentioned before, you just have a quick video you want to embed into

your blog, or you want to provide some video for iOS devices in the browser.

HTML5, particular the video, actually performs really well and it feels native to the browser, which it is.

Audio is the area that, again, is kind of lacking behind, although there are some new recent