Everything you need to know about HTML5 video and audio

Opera 10.50 has now been released on Windows, and it supports the HTML5 video and audio elements. But how do you use them? Introduction to HTML5 video covers a general introduction but doesn't go into the details; Accessible HTML5 Video with JavaScripted captions shows how captions can be implemented until the spec gains proper support for captions; and (re-)Introducing has some information on Opera's implementation. I recommend reading all three!

This article aims to provide all the nitty-gritty details of HTML5 media, the DOM API, events, and so forth, so you can implement your own HTML5 player with fallback to old browsers.

What's supported?

Opera 10.50 supports everything in the spec with the following exceptions:

• preload attribute is not supported. (autobuffer was changed to preload in the spec; Opera has autobuffer in the DOM but it doesn't do anything.)
• buffered, seekable and played IDL attributes always return empty TimeRanges objects.
• playbackRate and defaultPlaybackRate don't affect playback speed or direction.

Opera 10.50 on Windows and Mac support the Ogg container format and the Theora and Vorbis codecs, as well as the WAVE container format and PCM codec. Opera 10.50 on Linux and FreeBSD supports the container formats and codecs that are installed in GStreamer on your system. Make sure the GStreamer "base" and "good" plugins are installed for video and Ogg/Theora/Vorbis to work in Opera.

You can read the rest on:

http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2010/03/03/everything-you-need-to-know-about-html5-video-and-audio-2