HTML5 Agony

For Christmas I gave the missus a Kindle Fire HDX 7″. Couldn’t resist the $179 special price. The picture and sound are amazing but, like all Android-based products, Adobe Flash isn’t supported, and this site relies on Flash plugins for audio and video. So here I’m testing an HTML5 plugin for MP3 and MP4.

I’m very fond of the Flash audio player plugin, but the old, old WordPress theme that I’ve used lo these seven years causes it to conflict with the HTML5 plugin. I tried a workaround that doesn’t work, and now I’ve switched themes to accommodate this, and I’m still hitting a problem — two in fact — so now I’m disabling the plugin and going with the HTML5 media support that’s built into WordPress, which has fixed one issue but introduced another. Aaugh! Everything was running so nicely for such a long time, that this sort of frustration was inevitable.

Video support is also rather limited compared to the Flash plugin I’ve used, which can be adjusted to fix an incorrect aspect ratio, and smooth out a picture when it isn’t run in its original resolution. Both problems are apparent here.

For a long time I have been intending to restore a lot of video clips that were taken offline when I changed web hosting services, but now I also have to contemplate converting them from FLV to MP4. What a painful undertaking!

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