Apple has always been a leading innovator in terms of hardware design and OS improvements. Now they are leading the way by embracing next generation web technology by being one of the few websites to implement html5 video tags on a production website.
If you go to apple.com with a webkit powered browser (Safari/Chrome in Mac or Windows) and play some of the new videos promoting the new iMac and Magic Mouse, the videos are played using html 5 video tag. When you try to play the same video using IE or Firefox the QuickTime video player kicks. Even though the latest Firefox browser support html5 video tags, its implementation is limited to Ogg Theora, the video files on apple.com are MP4.
The video player using html5 tags under webkit browser looks very much like QuickTime X shipped with Snow Leopard. With non-webkit browser the video player buttons are distinctively different, as shown below:
Under Webkit Powered Browser (Chrome/Safari):
Non-Webkit Browser using QuickTime player:
You can find out more about other interesting html 5 developments including the video tags here.
Filed under: Apple & OSX, Browser, Web Design & Internet
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Comments:
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baron munchausen
10/22/2009FAIL. Chrome was first, they implemented first. The only thing Apple is a leader in is the box that holds the computer parts. They look really nice.
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mudfly
10/22/2009I would say that MP4 is limiting, why doesn’t apple implement ogg theora support in quicktime?
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moo083
10/22/2009mudfly: while in theory that sounds nice, ogg is limiting because no one has the plugin to read it installed and if you asked a layman why they should use ogg over mp4 when they need mp4 for their iPod, you’d have a hell of a time explaining it in a way that would actually make them care.
baron munchausen: This isn’t talking about who implemented the video tag first. Its talking about the first major website to actually implement it and Apple gets points for bravery there.
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Tom Krush
10/22/2009@baron munchausen
Interestingly enough Apple will tend to be first before Chrome. Primarily because Chome is developed on the Apple’s Webkit, the engine that powers Safari and many other browsers.
When it comes to Firefox that is a different ball game. Firefox is going to be first in different things, mainly in implementing open source technologies. You’ll find that Firefox is going to be a bit slower in when updating the HTML5 technologies compared to Webkit, just because HTML5 believe it or not is being largely influenced by the Webkit Project.
It definitely is an interesting battle between the Mozilla’s Gecko Engine and Apple’s Webkit Framework.
@ moo083
Apple does take a brave step in using HTML5 openly. We definitely should be utilizing this technology but be we also need to be careful. It would be great if more organizations would take this approach to web development. -
Omega X
10/22/2009@Moo083.
DailyMotion was among the first major sites to implement HTML5 Video. And in Theora at that. Not Apple.
@mudfly
Apple doesn’t implement Theora because they have their own agenda to push. MPEG4/h.264.
Google does not have such limits. Mozilla and Opera will refuse to implement h.264 as long as it’s patent encumbered and costly. Apple doesn’t pay the same fees as everyone else because they actively developed the format.
No doubt, Microsoft is going to pull something similar with WMV/WMA in IE9 when it gets here. Which leaves this little article to be a lot of flash and no dash.
Wake me when one format is natively implemented across the board without plugins.
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prisoner
10/22/2009@Omega X
The DailyMotion HTML5 implementation you are referring to is only a demo site (http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo) its not implemented site-wide. The whole purpose of it is to demo the video tag with dailymotion player (along with promoting the format). In case of Apple, they did it on a production site not a demo. As far as I know, they are first major site to use video tag on a live site (not for demo).
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steve
10/22/2009Why would i want to play ogg files? MP3/MP4.. everyones using it. Sounds/looks ok to me and its easy.
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Willy
10/22/2009You know Mozilla had HTML5 with Ogg Theora on their site? They implemented it before Apple by the way.
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Ari
10/22/2009I would say that ogg is limiting, why doesn’t mozilla implement mp4 support in firefox?
mp4 is the more popular format across all platforms while ogg is generally limited to linux geeks.
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WebSavior
10/22/2009@baron munchausen
WRONG! Apple had support for the tag in Webkit back in 2007 long before Chrome even existed.
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Apple CockSucker
10/22/2009Its not necessarily about who published/used it first, but which major companies that adopted it.
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experttease
10/22/2009I’m with Omega X on this one.
@prisnoner, apparently the article says it’s for their new Mouse and iMac videos, so not site wide as you suggest. I tried the iMac video in Chrome but it seems to use a different player menu to the one suggested in the article (I don’t think I have the quicktime plug-in).
In either case it’s all irrelevant: there’s absolutely nothing brave about making a first step in their push to obtain a monopoly over the video element. H.264 is not an open standard, therefore it should not make its way into an open standards framework. Yet this is what they shamelessly seek.
@Ari, Ogg is not about linux. It is used by linux OSs because it is open. It has been suggested for the HTML5 framework because it is an open standard. Linux does not tie the two, Ogg ties the other two.
It would be brave of them to support Ogg Theora, an open standard.
They are no better than MS in this matter. They are just cleverer, which they have to be as the underdog. I think they are tired of not having their own monopoly in computing.
Diversity is what will help everyone, and only open standards will enable a level playing field and make this possible in the best way.
Instead of arguing over who got there first, maybe you might switch your attention to where we should be going, otherwise you’ll wake up one day with a very sore head indeed.
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e cigarette
10/22/2009Nice… Apple just keeps outdoing themselves. They are seriously stepping up their game on all fronts. Microsoft better watch out now!
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A1
10/22/2009baron munchausen=Comment FAIL
You either made your “I’m a Chrome fanboy and I’m anti-Apple” comment because you did not read the article before commenting, or you did read the article, but could not comprehend the difference between a website and a web browser.
Chrome is a great browser, so are many others. Apple’s website is ahead of the curve on this one. Not that it matters to most of Apple’s website viewers, but technically it is nice to see.
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charles
10/22/2009Yeah, it’s really about Apple using the tag on the site, and *matching* the new quicktime controls from the latest mac os x. If you have a mac, and you’re watching those videos on apple.com, they’re going to look just like the videos you’re watching on the desktop. That’s pretty cool. Video on the web doesn’t usually look that nice.
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experttease
10/22/2009…and how can anyone say it’s brave when it defaults to quicktime? how is that in any way taking a risk?
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Wayne B
10/22/2009Yeah, Microsoft had better watch out now! Apple is going to lead the way in HTML5 Video and Microsoft will NEVER catch up. This is really important, ground-breaking stuff. I think this cements Apple’s place in the hall of great “innovators”.
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So much rage
10/23/2009‘Apple has always been a leading innovator in terms of hardware design and OS improvements. ‘
Stopped reading there.
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BHSPitMonkey
10/27/2009This article doesn’t seem to be correct. The videos mentioned (and any other video on Apple.com I could find) are using QuickTime Player embeds. This is not HTML5 video.
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Bruce
10/28/2009i can’t get the videos to play on Chrome/Windows – have tried several times.
Works fine in IE 6, and the controls look identical to those via Chrome.
go figure?
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Phil
10/29/2009What BS! Firefox has had this for months. apple leading the way? Hilarious! More like following behind… again.
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Joe
10/30/2009Great in theory… But have you tried viewing these pages on an iPhone? You can’t access the videos even though they are QuickTime. Naughty Apple!
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Hamranhansenhansen
01/09/2010> FAIL. Chrome was first, they implemented first. The only thing Apple is
> a leader in is the box that holds the computer parts. They look really nice.Chrome is a Google remix of Apple Safari. It’s a more business-oriented and nerd-oriented take on Apple’s browser. Google Chrome uses the Apple WebKit engine, which was released in January 2003 alongside Safari 1.0, many years before Chrome. Similarly, the browser engine in Android is the iPhone browser engine, Apple WebKit running on ARM. Apple makes WebKit, and Google remixes it. By definition, Apple is always first.
When Chrome OS ships, it will be essentially the open source part of Mac OS: a Unix core with a WebKit browser. Apple users have had that for 7 years now, as well as a native app platform. You can’t be pro-Chrome and be anti-Apple and make rational sense.
> What BS! Firefox has had this for months. apple leading the way?
> Hilarious! More like following behind… again.Firefox is behind Apple WebKit. Mozilla is much more conservative than Apple. Safari was released in January 2003 alongside the Mozilla browser. Firefox was not even thought about yet at that time. The Google box in the upper right? From Safari. A more lightweight browser? Safari. Safari is 4.0 and Firefox is 3.5, Safari is 100/100 in Acid3 and Firefox is 83/100. Firefox is a great browser, but the idea that it’s ahead of Safari is just ridiculous.
If you are a Windows user, Safari seems late to the game, shipping a buggy Windows version in 2007, a couple of years after Firefox. But at that point Safari was 4 years old on the Mac, and WebKit was 5 years old on the Mac and Linux. Firefox was 2 years old.
> I would say that MP4 is limiting, why doesn’t apple implement
> ogg theora support in quicktime?What you’re saying is like saying “I would say that C is limiting. Why doesn’t Linus Torvalds write the Linux kernel in JavaScript?” Because JavaScript doesn’t have the required features, and neither does Ogg. Because JavaScript is not what kernel developers write in, and Ogg is not what audio video developers produce.
Also, Ogg is not the consumer audio video standard. For the past 10 years, all consumer video devices have shipped with support for the ISO consumer audio video standard. It is not Ogg, it is MPEG-4 H.264. iPod and Blu-Ray and other video players do not have Ogg chips in them. Ogg chips do not exist.
A key feature of MPEG-4 is that it is the standardization of the Apple QuickTime file format, which is the basis of audio and video production. All the professional audio video tools could already “speak” QuickTime, so it was easy to upgrade tools from proprietary QuickTime to standardized MPEG-4. This was 10 years ago, by the way. It would have required massive development by tool vendors to support Ogg instead, and it would probably still not be implemented.
Ogg is the proprietary Linux video format. I know that sounds strange, “proprietary Linux” but that is true. Ogg is to Linux as WMV is to Windows. Neither format has anything to do with people outside of those 2 platforms, and no presence at all among people who make audio and video. Neither format has the toolchain that is required. It’s not suitable for anything other than hobbyist video, where you know you can play the weird format, and where losing a ton of disk space over MPEG-4 is not that big a problem. If you are shipping 1 million views of a video, the fact that MPEG-4 saves you 75% of the bandwidth compared to Ogg truly matters, the fact that people have MPEG-4 players and not Ogg truly matters.
The worst thing with people pushing Ogg is that they are just shooting their mouths off. You should have written code more than 10 years ago to make Ogg have the features it would require to be the consumer video format. If you didn’t do that, then STFU.
> DailyMotion was among the first major sites to implement HTML5 Video.
> And in Theora at that. Not Apple.WTF is DailyMotion? Is it a Fortune 500 company? Does it have a market cap bigger than Google? Is it the biggest distributor of video downloads on the Internet? That is Apple.
> Apple doesn’t implement Theora because they have their own agenda to push.
> MPEG4/h.264.
> Google does not have such limits.That is so outrageously absurd. Google owns YouTube, which is done entirely in MPEG-4 H.264. No matter what format you upload your video in, YouTube converts it to H.264 and that is the master copy. Google did a study of the feasibility of moving YouTube to Ogg, and they found that the Internet does not have the bandwidth for an Ogg YouTube, even if every other website went dark.
YouTube is now porting their HTML5/MPEG-4 mobile site to the desktop, so soon enough you will not need to burden your CPU and battery with FlashPlayer to see YouTube. Unless you are using Firefox.
Chrome also supports MPEG-4 video natively, same as Safari.
The reason Google is behind MPEG-4, same as Apple, is that both have a strong professional video presence and need to use the best tools. They can’t get away with using 10-years-out-of-date Ogg to make Linux philosophers happy.
> It definitely is an interesting battle between the Mozilla’s Gecko
> Engine and Apple’s Webkit Framework.It is not a battle. Both development teams are implementing the same standard: HTML5. Both development teams share information and make each other better. Having 2 open source implementations of an HTML5 rendering engine is better than 1.
Apple created the canvas tag for the Mac OS Dashboard, and offered it for standardization in HTML5. Mozilla suggested a number of changes to the canvas tag to make it work cross-platform and make it more appropriate for universal standardization. Then Mozilla implemented the standardized version, and Apple went into WebKit and also implemented the standardized version. In other words, Apple changed their own fully-functional canvas implementation to match the standard. They likely had to modify Dashboard as well as other OS X components because WebKit is not just the engine for Safari, it’s the engine for OS X.
> H.264 is not an open standard
That is completely and categorically untrue.
H.264 is ISO/IEC 14496-10, it is part of MPEG-4, it is the successor to the MPEG-2 video that is used on DVD, and the MPEG-1 from CD-ROM. MPEG-4 H.264 is the video on Blu-Ray disc and YouTube, not just iTunes and iPod. H.264 is what you make with your Flip camcorder. H.264 is not just ideal for playback in QuickTime Player, it is also ideal for playback in Adobe FlashPlayer.
H.264 is not proprietary to Apple, and neither is MPEG-4, which is an open standardization of Apple’s QuickTime file format. If Apple wants to push proprietary video, they are actually one of the few who could do it, but when you buy from iTunes, you don’t get a QuickTime file, you get an MPEG-4 file. Apple delayed video in iTunes until they could ship standard media.
The thing you have to understand is that HTML5 is a standardization of Web markup, the Web’s publishing language. Markup is the code in a Web page, not the code in a video file. HTML5 is not a standardization of audio video … consumer audio video is standardized by MPEG for 20 years now. HTML5 deals with the video TAG, not the video file format. People who make video don’t care what the W3C thinks about video formats, they care what MPEG thinks. They don’t care what plays in Linux, they care what plays everywhere. Not even Microsoft could defeat audio video standardization, because the music industry has killed itself a few times with competing formats and nobody wants to do that again. Audio and video is much older than the Web, and the Web is very new to it. Some humility is in order.
What makes it worse to say that HTML5 should dictate video formats is that Web standardization has almost always been a complete failure. HTML4 was forked between IE and the other browsers, HTML3 was forked between Netscape and other browsers. On the other hand, audio video standardization has always been a success, with the exception of Microsoft’s HD-DVD creating consumer confusion for a brief time, but it had very little impact other than that.
The idea that a developer would go out of their way to standardize their markup but use non-standard video is truly outrageous. What is the point of that?
Right now MPEG-4 H.264/AAC plays in both QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer, both iTunes and YouTube, Blu-Ray, iPods and other media players, iPhone and Android and other smartphones, Safari and Chrome, and hundreds of other players from hundreds of manufacturers. You can make MPEG-4 H.264/AAC with a Flip or Kodak or iPhone camcorder, you can edit it with Final Cut or Avid and many other tools. You can watch it with various set-top boxes like Roku or AppleTV or the ones you get from cable companies. We are in the golden age of digital audio video because a lot of people did a lot of work over the past 10 years to make it that way. As a consumer of video, you get all of this for free because it’s supported by a small charge on the encoder that is built-into all of these devices. As a producer of video, you can get an encoder for $29. Before Adobe adopted MPEG-4 in FlashPlayer, they used their own proprietary FLV format, for which the encoder is $599, and which has much larger bandwidth requirements and lesser quality.
So if you are anti-MPEG-4, you should literally sell any of the above devices or players and stop participating in consumer video. Whining that the world is not using your precious Linux format is as bad as Microsoft pushing WMV on the world, or pushing MSHTML on the world.
At the very least, do some reading before you shoot your mouth off. Find out WTF time it is in digital audio video. The Ogg versus MPEG-4 debate literally happened in 2000. The fact that Web browsers are only catching up now is no excuse to to act like the last 10 years did not happen.
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James Tillapaugh
01/31/2010That is the best response I’ve ever seen. I feel smarter after reading it. That doesn’t happen much.
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10/22/2009
Amazing, They implemented a draft doctype! Being ahead of the pack to implement new and potentialy unfinished elements is useless if the majority of the web doesn’t support it.