no movie in correct html?

[Peter Smit]

Is it impossible to put a movie on a webpage and still get approval from
3WCvalidation?
tanks for any direction
Peter

 

[Travis Newbury]

Is it impossible to put a movie on a webpage and still get approval from
3WCvalidation?

Yes, make a link to the movie. Also yes if you use the object tag to
embed the movie into the page

 

[Spartanicus]

Is it impossible to put a movie on a webpage and still get approval from
3WCvalidation?

<a href="video.mpeg" type="video/mpeg">my video</a>
http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/embed.htm#audiovideo

 

[Andy Dingley]

Is it impossible to put a movie on a webpage and still get approval from
3WCvalidation?

It's possible. These days the popular way to "put movies on" is to use
a Flash-based viewer. Embedding Flash is non-trivial (web search on
"Flash satay") but it's understood and valid.

Otherwise just use <embed>. It's pragmatic and it works.

 

[Peter Smit]

<a href="video.mpeg" type="video/mpeg">my video</a>
http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/embed.htm#audiovideo

Thank you for pointing this out. As I gather from your site Mr.
Spartanicus you used a graphic of a player and also a little png
with the playbutton wich in fact is a link wich opens a media player.
So no embedding of a player. true?
Peter

 

[Spartanicus]

Thank you for pointing this out. As I gather from your site Mr.
Spartanicus you used a graphic of a player and also a little png
with the playbutton wich in fact is a link wich opens a media player.
So no embedding of a player. true?

Correct.

 

[cwdjrxyz]

Is it impossible to put a movie on a webpage and still get approval from
3WCvalidation?

Yes, but one wouldn't know it if you use code that often is used to
embed the media on your page so that it stays in a box of defined
dimensions and does not jump to a media player and thus obscure part or
all your main page while viewing. These common codes get started out
right with an ActiveX object which is valid. However, most non-IE
browsers do not support ActiveX, so an embed path is included within
the ActiveX object, and it is taken by browsers, such as the Mozilla
family, that do not support ActiveX. The embed path is what produces
the errors at the W3C html validator, since embed is a relic from the
browser war era and never has been an official W3C tag. However most of
even the most recent browsers support the embed tag.

I am in the process of upgrading my media code for most of the more
popular video formats. This time I am working on getting the best
picture of large screen size for a high broadband connection - the
code will work just as well for lower bit rate videos and smaller sizes
for a web page that concentrates on text information and not the video
itself. I am not finished, but you can see an example at
http://www.cwdjr.info/video_extreme/cancanSWF.php . This large video is
designed for 2 Mbps or above if you want it to play without delay, but
it will work for a slower connection if you wait a while before
starting the movie. The controls at the bottom of the player show the
process of download as a thin bar. Contrary to what you usually see on
autostarted flash ads that can not be turned off, it is quite possible
to add controls as in my example. The problem with flash for many users
is that the flash programs often cost hundreds of US dollars. However I
found a flash program that does all I need to do for about $US 50.
Likewise you can write valid code for WMV, MPG, RM, MOV, etc. Many of
the larger flash movie sites such as YouTube and Google videos are
using a newer type of streaming flash, and this often uses server side
code - sometimes php. The actual video is a .flv (flash video) format.
Also there may be a jpg for a background image and other media. This is
all put together to produce the .swf at the time of downloading.

 

[Toby Inkster]

Is it impossible to put a movie on a webpage and still get approval from
3WCvalidation?

<object data="mymovie.mpeg" type="video/mpeg" height="240" width="320">

<p>... and here some text for the browsers that don't support OBJECTs.
You may for example want to include a <a href="mymovie.mpeg">link to
the movie</a> so that people can download it and view it in an
external player.</p>

</object>

 

[I V]

It's possible. These days the popular way to "put movies on" is to use
a Flash-based viewer. Embedding Flash is non-trivial (web search on
"Flash satay") but it's understood and valid.

The "flash satay" article is deeply bizarre, an example of cargo cult
coding. The author randomly pokes around with bad, non-standard, generated
flash embeding, until he comes up with... erm, the obvious way of using
the object tag (that is, you put the URL of the object you want to embed
in the "data" attribute), that he would have figured out in 30 seconds if
he'd looked at the damn standard.

IE has (or had, perhaps) a bug that makes that method sub-optimal (it
won't start playing the flash movie till the whole thing has downloaded),
but there's a workaround: http://blog.gilluminate.com/?b=20041208120812 .

 

[Andy Dingley]

The "flash satay" article is deeply bizarre, an example of cargo cult
coding.

I don't know enough about Flash, Flash embedding or even the detailed
use of <object> to comment further. I'm merely comparing "Flash
wrapped" vs. "bare" video. I don't do this particular stuff often, but
when I do I've found (as I suspect the OP has) that the "correct"
approaches to embedding bare video are so limited and broken in terms
of the results that they deliver to the user as to be unworkable. A
year ago (when I Iast did this) I ended up with <embed> as a widely
supported way of embedding video with a known container size. These
days I'd look at how YouTube et al. are doing it and probably go with
a Flash wrapper.

So what's wrong with Flash satay and how should it be done better?
Assuming a level of ignorance as I describe above, how should a "HTML
competent" developer best slap a video onto a page?

 

[cwdjrxyz]

coding. The author randomly pokes around with bad, non-standard, generated
flash embeding, until he comes up with... erm, the obvious way of using
the object tag (that is, you put the URL of the object you want to embed
in the "data" attribute), that he would have figured out in 30 seconds if
he'd looked at the damn standard.

IE has (or had, perhaps) a bug that makes that method sub-optimal (it
won't start playing the flash movie till the whole thing has downloaded),
but there's a workaround:http://blog.gilluminate.com/?b=20041208120812.

You can find many variations. The problem with using just a
conventional object and not ActiveX object for the IE is that the
flash movie will not start streaming until it has completed
downloading. This is no problem for a small size movie, but there is
for a large one such as the 20 MB version I used in my example. Since
we do have the IE conditional comments, it is easy enough to route to
a full ActiveX path for IE and route to another path such as a
conventional object for other browsers including the Mozilla family
and Opera. When making a swf, that may include a video and other
material, one has many options. One can build in an automatic link to
another swf, for example - a sort of play list, if you will, just as
you can use a .wvx playlist for WMP or a .rpm playlist for Real. All
of these are part of the properties of the respective media and are
not part of html and thus are not validated by the W3C html validator.
Now if you play a series of swf files that are linked to one another
internally when they are encoded, only the first file in the chain
requires full download on the IE before it starts. Thus if you use a
very small swf, even nearly a blank one, before the big video that
comes next, then the big video will stream normally. This is the basis
for the satay and several other closely related methods.

There is really no one-size-fits-all method for including video. Most
of the big media sites here in the US use Microsoft, Real, or flash
formats for movies. They usually use a special streaming server to
better control even downloading and can support multiple bit rate
streams for various speeds for connections. Often they will
automatically select the best bitrate stream for the viewing browser.
However, all of this is beyond the experience, and often budget, of a
private programmer who only uses a bit of video.

 

[dorayme]

how should a "HTML
competent" developer best slap a video onto a page?

That is a damned good question and I would be all ears for an
answer that I could use and stick with.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

So what's wrong with Flash satay and how should it be done better?
Assuming a level of ignorance as I describe above, how should a "HTML
competent" developer best slap a video onto a page?

The end solution is actually quite good.

You know how in the maths classes at school, you're often required to show
your workings. Perhaps there is one mark for getting the right answer in
the end, but the rest for using the right techniques. That way, if someone
uses the correct methods to get to the answer, but forgets to, say, carry
a one at the penultimate stage, they still can get most of the marks.

Anyway: Flash Satay; one mark for the correct answer; zero marks for the
workings.

The Flash Satay article shows the author blindly adding and removing
things from his code until he gets something that both validates and
works. At no point does the author seem to be aware of which bits are
proprietary rubbish, and which bits need to stay there for functionality.
He seems to arrive at the correct answer mostly by trial and error.

In reality, the answer for how to embed a Flash object in HTML is
pretty damn obvious by just looking at the HTML spec. The only detail
that's non-obvious is the correct MIME type to use for Flash, but that
can be looked up on Google in a matter of seconds.

Perhaps he knew what he was doing all along and just wrote it that way to
make better reading.

Anyhow, the one useful technique in that article what couldn't have been
learnt from looking at the OBJECT definition in the HTML spec, or ten
seconds of Googling is the idea of a redirector Flash object to help with
streaming. This technique was already being used with great effect for
video and audio files (ASX, RAM and M3U playlists), but he provides source
code for achieving this effect in Flash, which I don't think was
particularly prevalent before the article was published.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/CSS/Javascript/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!