At the recent Open Video Conference, I was asked to chair a working group on HTML5 and the <video> tag. Since the conference had attracted a large number of open media software developers as well as HTML5 <video> tag developers, it was a great group of people that were on the panel with me: Philip Jagenstedt from Opera, Jan Gerber from Xiph, Viktor Gal from Annodex, Michael Dale from Metavid, and Eric Carlson from Apple. This meant we had three browser vendors and their <video> tag developers present as well as two javascript library developers representing some of the largest content sites that are already using Ogg Theora/Vorbis with the <video> tag, plus myself looking into accessiblity for <video>.

The biggest topic around the <video> tag is of course the question of baseline codec: which codec can and should become the required codec for anyone implementing <video> tag support. Fortunately, this discussion was held during the panel just ahead of ours. Thus, our panel was able to focus on the achievements of the HTML5 video tag and implementations of it, as well as the challenges still ahead.

Unfortunately, the panel was cut short at the conference to only 30 min, so we ended up doing mostly demos of HTML5 video working in different browsers and doing cool things such as working with SVG.

The challenges that we identified and that are still ahead to solve are:

annotation support: closed captions, subtitles, time-aligned metadata, and their DOM exposure

track selection: how to select between alternate audio tracks, alternate annotation tracks, based on e.g. language, or accessibility requirements; what would the content negotiation protocol look like

how to support live streaming

how to support in-browser a/v capture

how to support live video communication (skype-style)

how to support video playlists

how to support basic video editing functionality

what would a decent media server for html5 video look like; what capabilities would it have

Here are the slides we made for the working group.

Download PDF: Open Video Conference: HML5 and video Panel

Video: Video of the session at archive.org