freeform goodness

wow, lotta work to put a video on the internet. I thought apple "just worked." Guess they forgot this part :P

Well, I made it difficult for myself by doing it the "right" way, rather than just dropping a YouTube embed here. ☺ The sad fact is that there is no simple way to serve a single video to all of the major browsing platforms.
It's all duct tape and bailing wire, but at least it's well-specified duct tape and bailing wire now.

Nice dinosaur!

And no VP9? I guess the encoders aren't ready yet.

I worked on a video site recently and the transcoding was surprisingly troublesome. Looks like things aren't better with a god phone. Surely Apple being the master of software, hardware and generally genius, they could create a one click solution for transcoding to a few formats and creating a snippet of HTML. It's not rocket science, just a bit bothersome. But – of course – it's an ideological problem, rather than a technical one.

ssp: I didn’t seriously consider VP9/WebM whatever as I don’t consider it fully baked yet (hah, says the guy trying to do HTML5 video embedding…) Besides, I don’t think there’s any browser that supports it that doesn’t already support Theora, so I guess it would be an interesting enough exercise, my primary interest was in modifying my templates to be mostly HTML5 compliant. The biggest adjustment for me (wrt existing entries) is that all the old style attributes (e.g. align, border, etc.) you used to be able to set directly on things like IMGs have to be done with CSS now. I understand why this was done (conceptually cleaner) but in practice it makes pretty much every old blog entry I’ve ever done invalid in HTML5.