HTML5: More than Just Video

While it's HTML5 video that gets all the attention, there's a lot more to HTML5. At the recent HTML5 Video Summit in Los Angeles, Michael Dale, senior developer at Kaltura, guided the audience through all the mark-up language's many new and improved offerings. He also touched on a few video-related topics, including how HTML5 makes video decoding possible in the browser.

"The HTML5 platform is becoming very robust and you can see real complicated --- H.264 decoding is even complicated for desktops, right? If you don't do it right on a desktop player, it's going to be choppy and not decode in real-time. The fact that they're able, we're now able to see it running in a browser faster than real-time on a desktop browser is indicative of where things are headed. It also runs on your phone because we're able to push out these modern browsers even though the Android update to -- I'm running a nightly build of Firefox or something on this device and it's able to take advantage of the latest features of JavaScript and able to decode the video on a phone, as well, in JavaScript.

"It doesn't work very well; it probably eats the battery very quickly, but the point is that the HTML5 platform overall is becoming very robust and supportive of a lot of features. Here's the Google Maps thing I was talking about earlier. This is using WebGL. Notice that it's very smooth, it looks more like a native application, it doesn't have that choppy title-based thing going on," said Dale.

For more on HTML5, including practical application and a look at where HTML is going next, watch the full video below.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net