Chapter 7 : Multimedia Playback
The desire to use the Internet to broadcast audio and video to consumers has been around almost as long as the Web itself. Multimedia browser plug-ins, usually restricted to certain audio and video formats developed by certain manufacturers, and streaming servers to provide content to these plug-ins, have been around for several years. In recent times, format-specific plug-ins have been shunned by many web developers, who have opted to use the Adobe Flash Player browser plug-in, largely due to its proliferation.
This chapter begins with the important topic of how to deal with accessibility for multimedia content. Then it covers some prebuilt audio and video player components that utilize the Flash Player plug-in. Finally, we’ll take a look forward to the future of native browser support for audio and video.