Podcast
Features
CommentsWe in pubradio web-publishing may be ready for a switch to HTML5 audio. The standard is now supported by the big four browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
All their latest versions come with a built-in audio player. All but Firefox* can play MP3s.
Transom uses a Flash player, with HTML5 audio fallback for iOS devices like iPad/iPhone. But it might be time to reverse that and default to HTML5 with a Flash fallback for Firefox and older browsers. That’s the route PRX took in their new embeddable player.
The screenshots below — from the great HTML5 test resource — show the current state of browser support for the <audio> tag.
Web-Browsers: HTML5 Audio Awareness
| Windows | Mac |
|---|---|
Internet Explorer 9 and 10 beta: |
Safari 5: |
Firefox 10 (Win): |
Firefox 10 (Mac): |
Chrome 17 (Win): |
Chrome 17 (Mac): |
* To use an MP3 audio codec, browser manufacturers must pay a fee to the MP3 patent holder. Mozilla, the non-profit that makes Firefox, prefers a royalty-free web, so has not licensed MP3, but does support the free, open-standard Ogg format.
UPDATE: For a extensive audio-specific rundown of browser capabilities, check AreWePlayingYet? — A pragmatic HTML5 Audio test suite (hat tip to AndrewK of PRX).
Hey Barrett,
Another good resource for html5 audio browser support is:
http://areweplayingyet.org/
A future FF is adding support for MP3 if the decoder is present on the system:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/-xTei5rYThU/0WSwLN7N_EwJ
Thanks PRX-ers Drew and Chris, below, for the additional info. Added the Are We Playing Yet link to the article. I hope Mozilla does fork over the dough for the h264 and mp3 codecs, tho I understand the reticence of a non-profit & of an open-source project to do so.
Hey Barrett,
I just wanted to mention that over hear at PRX we actually replaced pretty much *all* of our audio players on the site with the HTML 5 version, not just the embeddable players. It’s been over a month and the transition has gone very smoothly; a very small number of people have had to upgrade Flash player to be compatible with the shim that jPlayer ships with. Not a huge problem, and avoidable if absolutely necessary (though any excuse to get people to upgrade flash is a win in my book). And other than that we’ve only heard positive feedback. So at the end of the day we have more maintainable code, a player that works on mobile devices, and performs better on the desktop. We haven’t seen a real need at this point to re-encode our catalog to Ogg for native Firefox support, but it’s still something we’re considering. Point being, we took a pretty gung-ho approach to this, and it’s turned out really well, so I don’t think people should be at all hesitant to start making this move. Even if they just dip their toes in that’s a great first step, especially if they aren’t as well positioned as Transom with an HTML fallback for mobile, which seems to be the case more often than not.