Chapter 6Multimedia: Preparing Your Media
Before we begin talking about HTML5's multimedia elements, let's talk about preparing your media. Though we can now use native HTML5 elements in most browsers, we can't (yet) use the same files in every browser. We touched on this in the introduction, but a fuller explanation is appropriate. I've tried my best to be fair about it.
So why can't we use the same files in every browser? The short answer is: file formats.
Codec Showdown
The longer answer is this: browser vendors have not yet agreed on a single format for audio and video on the web.
When multimedia was first added to the HTML5 specification, Ogg—Vorbis for audio and Theora for video—was proposed as a standard, default format. The Ogg specification ...
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