Best HTML5 Video Format for Safari on Window (or getting VP8 to play in Safari on Windows)

Question

Here's the deal, through a huge series of events, I am stuck using Safari on Windows for video playback in HTML5.

I can't use any other browser, Chrome is out of the question, I must use Safari and it has to be on Windows for hardware compatibility.

The best format I've found is a h.264 Quicktime file, but I'm still getting some frames dropped and a bit of tearing.

The video is being played in 1920x1080 resolution and I have tried down-sampling to 720p, which causes noticeable quality loss and no noticeable gain in performance.

I'm looking for one of the following two as a solution: - A plugin for Safari (that's Windows compatible) to use something other than Quicktime for HTML5 video. I've looked and the WebM (VP8) plugin is only for OSX. - Any video format configuration that will decode faster in Quicktime on Windows. I've even tried ProRes to no avail, it's even slower than h.264.

Answer 1

Update... Ogg Theora can be played in Quicktime with XiphQT, but I've ran into many issues when trying to playback various Ogg video formats.

With h.264, if you are using x264 (eg: Handbrake) to transcode/encode video, the following can be set in advanced mode:

cabac=0:ref=1:me=umh:bframes=0:weightp=0:8x8dct=0:trellis=0:subq=6:tune=fastdecode

These parameters:

• ref=1, set the reference frame limit to 1, using more reference frames requires more processing.
• bframes=0, disables b-frames, not sure on this but I believe that forces P-frame which are faster
• cabac=0, disables CABAC compression, which would make the output smaller but take more processing
• tune=fastdecode, set's the tune preset to optimize the output specifically for decoding

The other options I am not as sure of and have yet to find solid evidence on their impact towards decoding, let alone if they have any impact on decoding. For example, the "me" setting is for subpixel strength in the transcoding process, it has an effect on video quality, but understanding how frames change, it could have an impact (in some videos) on the decoding process. That is something I do not know, but am stating for a better understanding of where I am coming from.

More about these settings can be found here:

http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings