Best Way to Embed Video

Monday, July 20, 2009

For years, I've used <embed> tags to display various AVI, MOV, and MPG videos we've taken. Most of these were taken by point-and-shoot digital cameras that output AVI, which we edited with Quicktime or Premiere Elements to produce MOV (and lately, flash video FLV, too - but that's not a problem here). The trouble is that the AVI put out by our Canon cameras most often didn't play in Windows Media Player, and a Quicktime MIME-type setting usually fixed it.

However, that was bad, because every visitor would need to fix that! The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was when Vista did away with MIME types, and controls everything through file associations. No amount of work would get the movies to play at all in Firefox, let alone in Quicktime (yielding the dreaded Unknown plugin vide/ms-video error). IE would pretend to play them, but didn't work because WMP didn't know what to do with the videos.

I finally find the answer with a very clean, standards-friendly implementation of <object> tags that makes everybody happy! Hurray!

Along with my new, "videos-only" search option, now we can laugh until our sides hurt at all the funny antics of our kids from years ago.

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