Sunday 23 December 2012

HTML5 video playbackRate and Ogg chaining support landed in Firefox

Paul Adenot has recently landed patches in Firefox to enable the playbackRate attribute on HTML5 <audio> and <video> elements.

This is a cool feature that I've been looking forward to for a while; it means users can speed up playback of videos (and audio) so that you can for example watch presentations sped up and only slow down for the interesting bits. Currently Firefox's <video> controls don't have support for playbackRate, but it is accessible from JavaScript, and hopefully we'll get support added to our built-in controls soon.

Paul has also finally landed support for Ogg chaining. This has been strongly desired for quite some time by community members, and the final patch also had contributions from "oneman" (David Richards), who also was a strong advocate for this feature.

We decided to reduce the scope of our chaining implementation in order to make it easier and quicker to implement. We targeted the features most desired by internet radio providers, and so we only support chaining in Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio files and we disable seeking in chained files.

Thanks Paul and David for working on these features!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good, multimedia tags getting enriched!

JinTheTin said...

Is there a target date for mp3 support on Mac? If I remember correctly, it already exists for Windows, yes?

-John

cleffy said...

Seeking is very valuable.
Please work on being able to seek in chained files.

cleffy said...

Being able to seek is very valuable.
Please make being able to seek in chained files a priority.