Beginning HTML5 Media

Book excerpt: Beginning HTML5 Media, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to HTML5 video and audio. The HTML5 video standard enables browsers to support audio and video elements natively. This makes it very easy for web developers to publish audio and video, integrating both within the general presentation of web pages. For example, media elements can be styled using CSS (style sheets), viewed on a mobile device, and manipulated in a Canvas or an audio filter graph. The book offers techniques for providing accessibility to media elements, enabling consistent handling of alternative representations of media resources. The update includes all of the changes and revisions since the first HTML5 draft. Beginning HTML5 Media dives deep into the markup that is introduced for media element support in browsers. You’ll explore the default user interface offered through browsers for media elements, as well as the JavaScript API provided to control their behavior. You’ll also learn how to account for H.264, WebM and Ogg Theora codecs as well as explore the emerging Web Audio API standard, which provides an extensive set of hardware-accelerated audio filters to achieve a level of audio signal manipulation in the browser previously only available to audio professionals.