New Interactive Screen for Web Media
June 18, 2013, Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age, SPMTE and SCIEN conference, Stanford, CA—A panel took on the topic of HTML 5 and Canvas for the interactive Internet. The program chair and moderator was Jan Skoglund from Google. Speakers included Hugh Finnan from Google, Jet Villegas from Mozilla, and Dirk Schulze from Adobe.
Schulze opened with descriptions of Canvas and the HTML5 standard. The video tags allowed in the mark-up language can be integrated into web pages for streaming entertainment and other active content. Canvas is set of graphic extensions that create a surface on the web page. This surface is available for functions like gaming, massive drawings, and image manipulation through code fragments. The graphics effects include alpha-numeric components and blending. The next generation will include multiple filter effects.
Villegas extended the descriptions relative to the speed of the plug-ins compared to native. The rendering development team is combining CSS, Javascript, and HTML5 as a replacement for Flash. There are some (open source?) Flash players that now use HTML 5 and Javascript for render.
This work is driven by the security issues in Flash, the biggest user, YouTube, has a high complexity conversion process to use Flash for videos and ad insertions. For 3-D games, the code source is in C or C++ and is translated to ASMJS to run native in the browser. The underlying processor needs to perform the runtime player functions, and the HTML 5 versions run at half he speed of native code.
Finnan commented that in Chrome media, there are two basic technologies for video content: HTML5 for premium content and open media formats for other content. The adoption issues facing HTML5 are that there is no premium content due to security issues, no capabilities for full screen display, inability to work with adaptive streaming, and no captioning. One interim solution is to use Chrome books instead of PCs, and wait for the technology to catch up. The VP8 codec is now available royality free and its successor VP9 is being used by YouTube because it is 50 percent more efficient than H.264.
Mobile browsers?
Villegas responded that Web-GL is more mature in desktop machines. Mobile uses different tags, but is getting better.
Finnan added that UML is being implemented.
Time to interactivity with Blu-Ray menu?
Villegas noted that the data density for interactivity is higher in HTML
Finnan declared that video quality is up due to increased bandwidth.
VP9 and 4k, adaptive streaming?
Finnan affirmed that VP9 will support 4k, but will not have adaptive streaming.
Built-in profiles in browsers?
Finnan claimed that adaptive streaming tries to address this issue in its efforts to meet bandwidth levels and requirements.
Villegas referred to the specification identifying the media source extensions. The client should not have to worry about the specific interface. SMPTE data interchange standards are in an accelerated development process.
Quality of service?
Finnan stated that a Blu-Ray has a guaranteed bandwidth, but the Web is a lot lower and intermittent.
Smart TV?
Finnan considered that it is nice to think about content delivery via a browser, but TV wants to own the user experience.
