I'm currently helping a friend develop a web application in which I need ~6 audio tracks (all using the same time signature) to continuously loop and stay in sync. To give context, it is a typeface-music pairing application where as soon as a typeface is chosen, the associated audio loop starts playing and as the user keeps picking typefaces, the tracks layer and begin to resemble a song.
I've tried using SoundJS and the Buzz sound library, but I keep running into the same problem: there is always a slight delay between loops. This would be fine if all my audio tracks were the same length, but they aren't, so very quickly things go out of sync.
This seems to be a known problem, but I can't seem to find any answer to how to fix it. I came across Hivenfour's SeamlessLoop 2.0, but - unless I'm using it completely wrong - it doesn't actually seem to work (setting a volume returns an error).
If anyone has experience with this, I would truly appreciate any input! Thanks :)
SoundJS WebAudioPlugin uses a look ahead approach with web audio that will loop seamlessly, which is described here in a what will probably be a very helpful on audio timing.
Also be aware that some compression formats will insert white noise into sounds. I believe mp3 does this. WAV is supported broadly and does not.
As for HTMLAudioPlugin, we loop as smoothly as the browser will allow but it does not have the same precision as WebAudio.
Hope that helps.
I have an idea to build an interactive HTML5 video player, I do not want to build something that has already been done but would like to expand on existing ideas. Are there any libraries for building user interactions in HTML5 video, I have looked at popcorn.js, but would like to see other proofs of concept or libraries.
Take a look at H5P.
H5P comes as a Drupal module and Joomla extension that allows you to make your videos interactive, directly in your browser. Much the same way as with Popcorn Maker.
In case you woul like to use a more generic framework vi-two.js https://github.com/nise/vi-two could be interesting for you. It has been included in wordpress and mediawiki. It provides many different kinds of video annotations and features that go beyond popcorn.js:
video zoom
playlist
spatio temporal hyperlinks / cyclic links
temporal tags
table of contents
synchronized slides/images
Ok I'm putting it out there... There is no clear information on the internets about iBooks 1.5, ePUB3 and CSS3 animation being used to create interactive eBooks.
Apple recently featured "The Beatles - Yellow Submarine" ebook and this has some very basic animation, audio and video. I have some great ides for this space however I can't find anywhere how I can create this myself.
I can create a basic eBook with images and video and using tools like "calibre" or "pages" can get them into iBooks but I'm stumped on anything harder using javascript (can I use Jquery etc) and CSS3 animation...
Any ideas where I can find this information????
A lot of the information you are looking for is in the iBookstore Asset Guide, which is available from Apple once you have an iTunes Connect account. For example, Apple recommend using JavaScript to trigger interaction and CSS for the actual animations and transitions. I have heard about someone using jQuery but do not have an example I can point you too.
Liza Daly has a good example (http://blog.threepress.org/2010/06/24/javascript-and-interactivity-in-ibooks/) but be aware that her post is well over a year old and was written with a much earlier version of iBooks in mind.
Please let us know of any good resources you come across.
Some (basic) information about scripting can be found here, here and here. Hope it helps
With apple browsers not supporting flash or silverlight, there is a real incentive to avoid flash / silverlight to avoid losing that audience when building a web site. That being said there is certain functionality that it seems like you can only really do in flash / silverlight
for example alot of simple games where you can move things on the screen like this site all seem to be built in flash. also, a lot of drag and drop functionality where you can drag one object onto another like these game sites.
After lots of searching I can't find any that are not either flash or silverlight based.
In particular i am looking for drag and drop support of one element onto another
my question is if you need this type of functionality is javascript / html 5 able to do this type of stuff (so you can support iphone / ipad) or are you out of luck.
is there any resource that highlight examples or suggestions of trying to do this type of interactive functionality and how / if you can do this type of stuff without silverlight / flash. also, if anyone has any good examples of existing site who are doing that today that would be great as well.
This is going to be a long discussion about the ability of html5 to compete with flash.
In my opinion jquery is not any close to performance flash or silverlight animation give.
if the comparison is in terms of drag-and-drop, menu dropdowns, fadeIn.fadeOut - jQuery is competitive.
If i will see the jQuery cartoons with lot of layers and objects moving simultaneously - i will probably agree that jQuery has competitive performance.
the things are compare to see the difference:
magnifying glass over the raster picture
smoke/water/fire emulation
compound 3D objects like fractals with deep branches
when HTML5 will have it - then i will agree that it has competitive performance. All that i see today is picture slideshows and couple of games that work on html5.
You can check Easel.js by Grant Skinner, used in Pirates Love Daisies.
Also, other frameworks are:
enchant
limeJS
akihabara
JQuery UI has that for long time, works in all modern browsers, not just HTML5
JQuery UI Demos
You should checkout canvasdemos.com. It has a lot of good examples of what can be done. You can take a look at the source code behind these - some even help you in that regard. e.g. the pool game
Other good examples include the doom like "game" (you can walk around in 3D dungeons).
The Frog Log game was the winner in the 10KB coding challange
Also this was the first result for a search of html5 animation demo in google. It has links to 48 demos. Some of them are really cool. Unfortunately the code for a lot of these have been minified, but they still might give you a few ideas about what you can achieve.
So it's fine for making simple dressup type games. However, if you are looking to make anything that's CPU intensive, you should look into some performance benchmarks like this. HTML5/Canvas based animation is still quite far behind flash in terms of performance. Getting consistent behaviour across the various browsers will also be an issue.
HTML5 and related technologies (WebSockets, WebGL, web storage, File API, media capture, etc) are quickly moving towards parity with (and in some cases exceeding) what can be done in Flash/Silverlight.
The HTML5 Rocks slides are a reasonable starting point to see what is possible (you need an HTML5 capable browser). In particular, the Canvas example demonstrates image manipulation (drag, rotate, resize) which is the core functionality needed to implement dress-up games.
Flash was designed for animation. The tweens were meant to be used for animating drawings. Because it was marketed to every Tom, Dick and Harry, people started using it to animate hideous menus and flying content text. And Adobe complied to this new use, building an abode of total chaos.
Flash is still the best animation engine for the web, it should never have catered to full flash websites.
Many HTML5 fans out there, but it needs to be said: Canvas is a decade behind Flash. But for everything other than animation, Flash is an abomination.
In old browsers, you can emulate drag'n'drop of elemnts from the DOM but in new browsers, you can also drag'n'drop files (like images) and there are events for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DragDrop/Drag_and_Drop
For flash-like animations, it's been possible with JavaScript for a long time but doing some bug ones was really hard and often slowing down the page.
Now, there is canvas and WebGL that allow you to do it in a more convinient way (for the complex ones).
And with canvas, WebGL, CSS animations (if you use the tric to make the browser think it's 3D), you get CPU accelerated so it's way faster.
There is also requestAnimationFrame that allows to optimise the reflows and therefore the script.
The best example I know on what can be done is the Quake II port to the Web :
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhMN0wlITLk&feature=player_embedded
Project's site: http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/
as said in soe of the answers above, I'm pretty sure jquery's draggable/droppable plugin will do the job for you if you just need a basic drag and drop dress me up type of game. Basic premise is this:
in the default example, your avatar to wear the clothes would be a div with a png/gif.jpg background image of a girl/boy whatever(instead of an orange drop here background)
the clothes will be the "drag me to my target" objects in the example. you can create them as divs or even image tags that have the draggable class in them so you can drag them around and drop them in the orange boxes/avatars.
you can save the data using ajax, which is also covered in the examples there(or other tutorials in the net, it's easy)
???
PROFIT
Just try it out and see for yourself. If you need any help you can just ask here again, but I do think that the jquery UI answers are valid answers to your problem.
I don't have an example site to show you, but I'm pretty sure given some images and stuff I can whip out something...if I had the time lol.
You can definitely do these "flash-like" things now in HTML5 web browsers. Check out the examples at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
In fact HTML5/CSS3/JS can do anything flash can do. But there are some drawback :
It is not yet mature. Lot of bugs, lot of difference in implementation depending of browsers and many people simply don't have yet browsers that support it.
Adobe has a really nice set of tools that help making complex flash applications. This doesn't exist (yet ?) at the same level for HTML5.
On a side note, neither flash, neither HTML5 will really shine on mobiles phone. People prefer native applications anyway. You might need to provide a web version, but you'll need too a app version (one per big phone player).
We can speculate how HTML5 will rule the word in the next few years, but as of now, impact are limited outside of nice looking demo that consume 100% of CPU (really, really bad for mobile device).
For drag and drop support, anybody can do that - in HTML4 and in any browser with a few lines of javascript - inside one page, or can think to do it on between 2 browser windows of the same website. Doing drag & drop between browser and any native desktop application is another thing.
For a great example of what you can do with HTML5 in terms of drag and drop, I suggest you take a look at this article and in particular the short demo at the beginning. The article also highlights a few other goodies that come with HTML5, such as localStorage and the HTML5 Canvas.
For a more detailed tutorial on the HTML5 drag-n-drop API specifically (really it is a Javascript API), take a look at this other article. It is dated from December 2009 but still valid.
Lastly, this video gives you a good insight on some of the cool visual effects that you'll be able to do with HTML5 (SVG, Canvas, CSS3, WebGL, ...). More of a marketing video I'll admit but a good illustration of some of the more powerful HTML5 features (at least from a visual stand point) and of what we'll start seeing in our browsers in a not so distant future...
Disclaimer: I don't work for Mozilla. I just happen to have researched this topic in the past and found that the material produced by Mozilla, and in particular the demos from Paul Rouget, to be the most instructive.
jQuery UI is an amazing library...
Drag: http://jqueryui.com/demos/draggable/#default
Drop: http://jqueryui.com/demos/droppable/
I belive that the droppable examples will answer your question of "In particular i am looking for drag and drop support of one element onto another"
Is it possible to show how many % of the video is loaded?
I just need a simple string like: 32% loaded...
(I use non-streaming (progressive loading))
The FLV player that is built in, you can pretty much only do what you see, so displaying the % loaded, if not already displayed in the skin itself, is either not supported, or not documented. You can make your own skin http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flvplayback_programming.html or use one of the many other available options http://www.google.com/search?q=flv+player, or try the Widget Browser version (which should be CS4 compatible) of the HTML5 Video Player Widget, and that player is based on the following http://www.kaltura.org/project/HTML5_Video_Player it is theme-able. I've not seen a way to show the percentage yet, but perhaps their docs show how to do it.
There is another reference for talking back and forth between Flash and JavaScript, http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/156/tn_15683.html, but you'd need to know what to call, and again, the built in player doesn't appear to be documented well, at least from external interaction, or modifications of the skins themselves.
I know this is not dreamweaver player and it doesn't show %, but this is what I use in my projects http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/
It is a pretty cool player.