Chapter . Media Elements, Multiple Tracks, and Accessibility
The area most in flux in relation to the new media elements has to do with synchronized media playback, multiple audio, video, and text tracks, and media element accessibility. As to be expected, these areas also have the least implementation support.
A new addition to the HTML5 media elements is the new media controller object. This object provides for synchronized playback among multiple audio and video elements in a web page. When implemented, we should be able to play video and/or audio files in multiple elements in the web page via one controller user interface.
Another new addition is support for multiple audio and video tracks within the media resource. When this functionality is implemented, we should be able to pick from among a list of audio tracks in different languages, play director commentary along with the video, or enjoy picture-in-picture support.
There’s also browser support for multiple text tracks, too. Currently,
browsers parse the track element and it
becomes part of the Document Object Model (DOM), but no browser yet
processes the track element’s contents
and provides the caption or subtitle text. Happily, though, there are
JavaScript libraries that can process the captions or subtitles within the
track elements, giving us at least some interim functionality, as we’ll see
at the end of the chapter.
No firm commitment has been made—either in the W3C or by the browser makers—as to what text format to support ...
Get HTML5 Media now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
