The only people who’ll be left out will be:
Mobile Safari on iPhone 4+)Īt this point, the vast majority of internet users will be able to play your video. Note: The syntax of the tag has changed to include an explicit closing tag, to avoid confusing older browsers.
The simplest video embed code you can possibly use is as follows: Embedding video for modern browsers with commercial codecs Under-powered mobile devices (iPhone 3GS, cheap Android)įor the rest of this post, I’ll take you through the steps required to allow an increasing number of people to watch your video.Modern browsers using open-source codecs (Firefox, Opera).Modern browsers using commercial codecs (Chrome, Safari, IE9+).In order to embed video in your site, there are four major groups of people you need to keep happy: They employ some very clever people who’ve solved all the problems with embedding video. Please, just save yourself a headache, and host your video on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other third party service. Unfortunately, the shim is still used by hundreds of thousands of people each day, and embedding video is just as confusing as ever. It was called html5media.js.Īt the time, I assumed that the shim would be obsolete within a few years, just as soon as major browsers adopted a common standard and video codec.
In the early days of the HTML5 movement, I wrote the first major cross-browser compatibility shim for HTML5 and tags.