After much thought I’ve decided to work on developing a video player using JavaScript and HTML5. Up until recently Flash players have been the way to get a rich web experience but the advent of HTML5 may change all that in a plugin-free way. You can find information on the HTML 5 Open Video Player for now on our wiki, with more sources of information announced in the coming days on my colleague Kevin’s and my blogs.
We have three months in which to bring this to a fairly stable state. Release features below are subject to change (or may be covered by other project members), but dates are not. Details are still being worked out, but a (tentative) release plan is:
Version 0.1 (Oct 22, 2010) – In cooperation with Kevin to plan to build the core framework which includes the basic functionality of Play, Pause, Stop, Volume, Time display as well as to have CSS-customizable controls, Flash fallback and a re-sizable player. We also plan to have hard-coded English subtitles for our sample video.
Version 0.2 (Nov 16, 2010) – With the core built, my solo work will be to complete subtitle support by pulling subtitles from TTXT format and to incorporate internationalization into both subtitles and the video controls. Stat tracking will also be generated (though kept local to the user’s machine) along with source hiding to protect against downloads. Screen-reader accessibility will also be implemented at this stage in the project.
Version 0.3 (Dec 7, 2010) – Further functionality like the ability to “Like” a video and watermarks over the video will be introduced as will ratings information on the side.
As a browser-based application we luckily don’t have to worry about hardware limitations, but browser compatibility is of concern as accessibility of information is of paramount importance. We want this to be accessible, something which will become more difficult on non-standards-compliant browsers. Success will be determined by usability and accessibility of each deliverable. Success will also be determined by the modularity of the product so as to aid in future extensibility.
Never having worked with HTML5, a lot of research will be required to complete this project, but a series of tech demos and prototypes from which code and knowledge can be taken away will assist in completion of this project. As neither myself nor Kevin as extensive experience with audio/video, we’ll be learning a lot this project. Luckily, we’ll be in communication with knowledgeable Mozilla community members including Brett Gaylor and Anna Sobiepanek.
During development, I also plan to spend time contributing to a build and test system for the C3DL java script library. If any developers are interested in contributing to our project we welcome all, especially any with expertise in audio/video or JSON.
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