C H A P T E R  4

Working with Audio and Video

In this chapter, we’ll explore what you can do with two important HTML5 elements—audio and video—and we’ll show you how they can be used to create compelling applications. The audio and video elements add new media options to HTML5 applications that allow you to use audio and video without plugins while providing a common, integrated, and scriptable API.

First, we’ll discuss audio and video container files and codecs, and why we ended up with the codecs supported today. We’ll go on to describe lack of common codec support—the most important drawback for using the media elements—and we’ll discuss how we hope that this won’t be such a big issue in the future. We’ll also show you a mechanism for switching to the most appropriate type of content for the browser to display.