Better say nothing

24 November 2013

Sometime I try to understand the choices of html5 implementation. Simply because of a function, which makes me laugh, it’s ‘canPlayType’. This method is made to check if the browser can read a specific video codec. It sounds useful, especially when the most popular format is not open source. The problem is what we get: three possibilities : “”, “maybe” or “probably”. Yay! That’s very helpful, very helpful.

videoTag = document.createElement('video');
videoTag.canPlayType('video/webm; codecs="vp8.0, vorbis"');
> "probably"