Lately, I've been playing around with a few website-related things so I've been relatively quiet. And the last podcast mess really made me mad, so, yeah, but now I'm here and well I thought I'd let you know what I'm working on.
I've really wanted to implement audio on my site (mainly for idioPod) and wanted to use the <AUDIO> tag to do it.
But unfortunately, with most upcoming technologies, things aren't all the way put together.
To make it work with the newest Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox), I'd have to encode every MP3 file as an OGG file which I have noticed is very time consuming AND tedious. MP3 is a much more universal format, so I am sticking with it. I'm all for open sourced solutions, but this one doesn't suit me. So right now, the newest Mozilla-based browsers will show an X and the audio will not play. Additionally, I do not have anything to fall back on if I didn't also show the Flash player.
Because Internet Explorer (Trident-based browsers) and Opera (Presto-based browsers) do not support the AUDIO tag, a player is shown that will use Quicktime, Windows Media Player or even the VLC browser plug-in. It works, and it works quite well as far as I know.
For anybody who uses a Webkit-based browser (such as Safari, Chrome and such), it will work perfectly... the way I envisioned it would work.
With all this said, you're more than welcome to try out the new player. It will only play the latest episode of idioPod. You can keep it open and listen or you can just see if it works.
Note: You will see two players. The first is the Flash player (currently found on the weblog entries for podcast episodes). The second will either be the Quicktime/WMP/VLC plug-in or the AUDIO tag stuff. In Firefox 3.5+, the second player WILL NOT WORK.
Oh and if this weblog was a little too nerdy for you, I apologize. :)
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