Thomas B. Ruecker
2008-Sep-14 10:21 UTC
[Icecast] Icecast + theora stream + Firefox 3.1a2 = promising
Hi folks, just wanted to let you in on my research into use of theora streams in <video> tags. The current alpha 2 of Firefox 3.1 supports <video> tags [1] and ogg encapsulated theora + vorbis . Static files delivered by a webserver work just fine if they come in fast enough. But of course my interest is not in static files but in streams. So I hacked together a small html-test file[2] that references some random stream from our yp[3]. It took some experimenting, but eventually it works. If you want to test this for your stream just steal my html source. ;-) Of course there are still some issues left. Stream playback will stutter and stop a lot - this is due to a suboptimal caching strategy [4]. But Chris says it will be addressed within an refactoring[5]. Also it will fail on chained ogg streams[6]. This is an limitation of the used liboggplay[7] library. Let's hope this library gets updated soon, because it seems like right now there is no one maintaining it[8]. Also the stream will only play if the controls attribute is set[9]. If you discover another issue either let me know (by email or on irc #icecast) or directly open an bug in the mozilla bugzilla for "core" "video/audio". But so far I think this looks very promising. Playback of audio and video streams without any plug-ins! Cheers Thomas 1) Developer info on Firefox 3.1 - http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_3.1_for_developers#HTML_changes 2) One of my basic test files - http://www.ruecker-itk.de/icecast/firefox/theorastreamtest.html 3) Xiph's icecast streams YP - http://dir.xiph.org 4) Bug 455174 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455174 5) Bug 449159 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449159 6) Bug 455165 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455165 7) liboggplay website - http://annodex.net/software/liboggplay/index.html 8) Seeking a maintainer for liboggplay - http://blog.gingertech.net/2008/08/06/seeking-a-maintainer-for-liboggplay/ 9) Bug 455167 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455167