Streaming My Consciousness

One of the big challenges of streaming to the web is the sheer diversity of devices out there.

This past week, I pushed out some modifications to the player code on our live page that switches the player code based on what the user is connecting with. The genesis of this change was a problem with our change to JW Player Version 5 causing our PlayStation users to no longer be able to watch our video since JW v5 requires Flash 10 and Sony apparently doesn’t care about its customers. After a successful test with the Playstation, I extended the code to provide an HTML5 <VIDEO> tag for our iPhone users (allowing us to clear up some the clutter on the sidebar), as well as MMS and RTSP links around a graphic mimicking the Flash-based player in order to provide a consistent user experience for our Android/WebOS/BlackBerry/WinMo users.

EDIT: The main reason I’m not doing straight HTML5 with Flash fallback (a much more elegant solution) is that we’re sending out VP6 for our flash users and a lower-bandwidth h.264 stream for our mobile users. We’re not currently using h.264 for our flash users because of the poor quality of the h.264 encoder in Flash Media Live Encoder. Once we get a “real encoder“, we’ll send out a single set of h.264 streams and use HTML5 with fallback.

The code is here.

On our live stream page, we have a nifty little javascript counter that lets you know when the next service is.

Leo noticed today that in Internet Explorer, it’s counting down properly, while in Firefox, it’s saying the event is already happening. On a hunch, we changed the target date to 12/31, and it started working properly again.

So, IE’s Javascript is smart enough to figure out that on December 29, the target date of January 3 is likely to be the one next week. Firefox is clinging to the past and assuming that I really meant the January 3 that happened 51 weeks ago.

How is it that the same script can be interpreted so differently within the same language on two different browser platforms? This stuff is supposed to be standard!