H.264 / FLV best practices for HTML

Question

I run a website that has as part of it about 700 reference videos (And no, it's not porn -- get your mind out of the gutter :-) ).

The videos are currently in FLV format. We use the JWPlayer to render those videos. IIS6 hosted. Everything works just fine.

As I understand it, H.264 (not FLV and likely not OGG) is the emerging preferred HTML5 video standard. Today, the iPad really only respects H.264 or YouTube. Presumably, soon many more important browsers will follow Apple's lead and respect only the HTML5 tag.

OK, so I think I can figure out how to convert my existing videos into the proper H.264 format. There are various tools available, including ffmpeg.exe. I haven't tried it yet, but I don't think that's going to be a problem after fiddling with the codec settings.

My question is more about the container itself -- that is, planning graceful transition for all users. What's the best-practice recommendation for rendering these videos? If I just use the HTML5 tag, then presumably any browser that doesn't yet support HTML5 won't see the videos. And if I render them in Flash format via the JWPlayer or some other player, then they won't be playable on the iPad. Do I have to do ugly UserAgent detection here to figure out what to render?

I know the JWPlayer supports H.264 media, but isn't the player itself a Flash component and therefore not playable on the iPad? Sorry if I'm not being clear, but I'm scratching my head on a graceful transition plan that will work for current browsers, the iPad and the upcoming HTML5 wave. I'm not a video expert, so any advice would be most welcome, thanks.

Answer 1

Be aware Firefox does not support H.264 with the Video Tag, so if you want a graceful fallback then you should render your video tag like below and have an OGG version of the video.

       <video controls id="video" width="320" height="240" preload autobuffer >
            <source src="http://mycdn.com/videos/vid1.ogg" type="video/ogg" />
            <source src="http://mycdn.com/videos/vid1.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
            <!--RENDERED ON BROWSERS WITH NO HTML5 VIDEO SUPPORT-->
            <object width="320" height="240">
            <param name="movie" value="myplayer.swf">
            <embed src="myplayer.swf" width="550" height="400">
            </embed>
            </object>
             <!---->
        </video>