Firefox 3.5 Means Never Having To Say I'm Sorry (For My Video Format)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:26:53 GMT

Have you 3.5-ed yet?

I installed Firefox 3.5 on my Windows boxes, but not on my Linux boxes because Mozilla.org does not offer 64-bit Linux builds. One of the features of Firefox 3.5 is the support of the Ogg Theora video file format, which is the format of all of the screencasts I posted on this blog.

I use Ogg Theora because it is the native encoding format of the recordMyDesktop screen capture utility for Gnome. Since this format was not natively supported on Windows or Max OS X, every time I post one of my screencasts/demos, I have to put in a disclaimer—"Linuxy format, download VLC to view".

Not any more! Now you can view it directly in Firefox 3.5:

Sorry, your browser does not support the HTML 5 <video> tag. Get one that does.

(The video is from an old blog entry of mine showing JavaFX 1.0 playing Ogg Theora video files on Linux.)

Let the next round of the browser war begin!

JavaFX 1.0 On Linux: Video

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:00:30 GMT

[Update (Wed Jun 3 07:45:43 PDT 2009)]: As of June 2, 2009, you can download the Linux and Solaris version of JavaFX 1.2 SDK directly from http://javafx.com. The Linux and Solaris support is preview only.[/]

In the two previous posts, I showed how to install JavaFX SDK 1.0 and the JavaFX 1.0 NetBeans Plugin on Linux machines. In both cases, I used the Mac version of the JavaFX SDK.

This approach won't give us any native libraries for Linux. However, thanks to (via Pushing Pixels), we know a place where we can get those:

http://download.java.net/javafx/

If you look carefully, you may find jar files whose names contain "natives". Although not complete, the various Linux and Solaris platforms are represented. Download, unjar, and throw the resulting *.so files into the appropriate place, you've gotten at least some of the native capabilities. The most interesting of them all is

jmc-natives-linux-i586__V1.0.0.jar

which contains

libGStreamer.so
libon2_decoder.so

That could only mean one thing—JavaFX videos on Linux. Here it is (Linuxy format, you need extra software to view it on Windows and Mac):

This is an Ogg Theora video recorded with gtk-recordMydesktop in Fedora 10/i586 with OpenJDK 6 (in VirtualBox 2.0.6 in Vista SP1, on the other side of the dual-boot). It is also the video played by JavaFX inside the video. I wasn't able to play FLV videos when I tried. Well, they did say it's not ready.

Weiqi Gao's Observations - video tag

Firefox 3.5 Means Never Having To Say I'm Sorry (For My Video Format)

JavaFX 1.0 On Linux: Video