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View in HD The video is completely unrelated to this post other than the fact that HTML5 browsers will play it.

I've been playing with the delights of HTML5, and added videos to hopefully replace Flash. Not that I had a problem with Flash, but YouTube/Google are doing it, so that means everyone else has to because they're obviously correct - Google wins at the internet.

But the immediate advantages are the performance and quality, and it just feels nicer that it's embedded better into the page, although it has broken W3C complicances... for now.

The problem is that not all browsers support HTML5 - yes, you again, Internet Explorer. I hate you so much and never miss an opportunity to tell everyone how irritating you are. But even then, the browsers that do support HTML5 don't all support the same filetypes. Webkit (Chrome/Safari) play nice MP4/M4V file types, which means they play well on the iPhone and support an image to display that invites you to click to play.



Screenshot of the iPhone version of my site displaying the graphic that predictably leads to the video when tapped.

Firefox has done an IE and done things differently by not supporting MP4/M4V, and supporting OGG/OGV instead. The quality of the Firefox video is slightly inferior since I've had to put the video through two lots of compression (AVI > M4V > OGG), but hopefully in a future update Firefox will support MP4s so everything can be uniform. Or a good OGG converter appears - my attempts at finding one have resulted in me discovering SUPER, which does a good enough job at the actual converting, but takes far longer to start up than it does to convert. And I have to put an M4V through rather than the original AVI, because it adds a random green bar to the bottom of AVIs. Incidentally, I'm using Handbrake for the M4Vs.

The videos then fall back to Flash in Internet Explorer (playing the MP4 file rather than FLV to save another convert and upload). I doubt IE will support HTML5 this decade, so I guess Flash will be around a while yet. Not that that's a bad thing - Flash is great. But not so good for video, even though it has been the standard for so long.

I plan on creating a custom interface for the videos but for now I've allowed the default browser interface to be displayed, with a simple 'play' graphic over the top.

A quick video to show progress on the project I'm currently working on, along with a model of the real life car I created a while back for comparison.

Has an engine...

... and is going to involve lots of these blocks.

I've created an iPhone version of the website, mostly to take advantage of the automatic rotation after seeing an article on Engage Interactive. If you're using an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should be sent there as soon as you visit my site. If you don't have an Apple product (and normally I wouldn't blame you, I make an exception for the iPhone though), you can view the site here, although it'll not make much sense since it doesn't know which direction you're facing to be able to display the appropriate content.

So instead, here are some screenshots - taken with the phone's built in screen capture, by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously.

The home page:



Phone rota....

Updated the site properly this time rather than the half-hearted attempt I did a couple of weeks back, much happier with this one now.

Added the intro video to this post for future reference because I'm bound to change it later, especially when each piece of work I do is in theory better than the last (otherwise what's the point?), so needs to go on display. The video as it appears on the home...