- Explain the history of media on the web
- Demonstrate how to embed audio and video elements in HTML5
- Link to audio and video converters
The internet is a highly interactive environment. As HTML authors, we might be given a media file and be told to put it on the internet. How can we display media inside of a web page and make sure that it's viewable to the most people possible on the most devices? That will be the focus of this lesson.
In the early days of HTML, media elements were more difficult to use. They would often require the user to download and install a plugin. Media plugins you might recall were Macromedia Flash, Adobe Shockwave, and Java. This commercial plugin approach brings about a number of problems.
- It is seriously annoying to have to download all these plugins
- The site is unusable while you wait for a plugin to load
- The site is unusable without the plugin
- The site is unusable for those using assistive devices
- Bad guys could market a viral site which required the installation of a plugin. Plugin installation gives access to the operating system where they could install malware
- If a company's plugin became dominant, there would be a splitting of the web into a commercial thing versus the non-commercial thing ("The Internet, powered by Adobe Flash")
For these reasons and others, the W3C added media support in HTML5.
To include audio in a website, use the <audio>
element. Inside the element, we
provide <source>
elements whose src
attributes point to a file on the server
and whose type
attributes specify what type of media it is.
Let's take a deeper look at type
. The type
name is the "MIME standard" for
the filetype. MDN provides a long list of MIME types. A few
examples are text/html
, text/css
, images/jpeg
.
You might recall that files fit into two big buckets: binary and text. Sometimes
we need to be more specific within those groups. We want to say this is a text
file, but also HTML (text/html
). Or we want to say this is a binary file, but
also an MPEG movie (video/mpeg
). A MIME type is a way to note, for the
computer, exactly what type of file is present. It will help the computer find
the right player. It's also a bit more precise than a simple file extension
(.docx
or .img
).
To pull it all together, the type
attribute should be set to the "MIME type"
for the media pointed to by the src
attribute for each <source>
element.
Let's look at an example:
<audio controls>
<source src="purrr.mp3" type="audio/mp3" />
<source src="purrr.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />
<p>
Sorry your browser doesn't support HTML5 Audio! Please
<a href="http://browsehappy.com/?locale=en">upgrade your browser</a>.
</p>
</audio>
On the first line we open the <audio>
tag with the controls
attribute
present. This is required to display the audio controls to start and pause
playback, adjust the recording's volume, etc. The presence of the controls
attribute name itself is sufficient, no other properties are needed. There are
optional attributes you can provide such as autoplay
and loop
. These start
the audio on page load and repeat the audio after it ends. The
documentation lists all available options.
In lines two and three, we provide two different source files for playback. If
the browser does not recognize the first file type, it will ignore it and move
on to the next. If neither of the formats are supported it will instead display
the paragraph on line four. If the browser is able to play one of the source
files it will ignore any other code below until it reaches the closing
</audio>
tag.
Embedding a video is very similar to embedding audio. This can be done by
including the <video>
tag. Inside the video tag are source tags that point to
the location of various video file formats and specify their MIME types.
<video controls>
<source src="real-estate.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="real-estate.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
<p>
Sorry your browser doesn't support HTML5 Video! Please
<a href="http://browsehappy.com/?locale=en">upgrade your browser</a>.
</p>
</video>
Like <audio>
, we will open the <video>
tag with the controls attribute. For
the full list of accepted attributes, you can check the
MDN documentation.
On lines two and three we provide two different source files for playback. If
the browser does not recognize the first filetype it will ignore it and move on
to the next just the same as it does for the audio element. If neither of the
formats are supported it will display the paragraph instead on line four. If the
browser is able to play one of the source files, it will. The others sources
within the <video>
tag will be ignored.
There are a number of free tools that will convert audio files when needed. MediaHuman - Free Audio Converter and Audacity - Free Audio Editor/Converter are two we recommend. For a comparison of support levels for various players, see JavaScript HTML5 Video Player Comparison
With audio
and video
tags, the W3C gives us an open way to ensure that media
remain accessible and open to all platforms.