Chu Moy designed a very popular headphone amplifier that’s easy to build, and it can be built small enough to fit in a pocket, power supply and all. It’s powerful enough to drive very inefficient headphones to thunderous volumes from even weak sources, and it sounds excellent considering that you can build a bare-bones CMoy amp for just US$20, and a pretty nice amp for under $50. Considering that the cheapest of the worthy commercial amps is $100 and most of them are in the $200+ range, this is a very worthwhile cost difference.
1. In Sync Mode - press play on the player and use the space bar or sync button to synchronise the words with the audio.
2. Switch to Playback Mode to see the words synched to the audio. Click on the words to play the audio from that point. Try selecting areas of text.
HTML5: mp3, mp4 (AAC/H.264), ogg (Vorbis/Theora), webm (Vorbis/VP8), wav
Flash: mp3, mp4 (AAC/H.264), flv
For cross-browser support, a format must be supplied that works in both HTML5 and Flash.
Optional additional formats may be supplied to increase cross-browser HTML5 support.
Some things to try :
Switch the audio from English to Danish - it should continue from the same point in Danish, subtitles and the transcript should also change appropriately.
Try clicking on words in the transcript - the audio should start playing from the corresponding point.
Highlight a passage of transcript text - this should add a tweetable excerpt to the ’share’ box.
Using Hypertranscripts we can:
Navigate through the media via the text.
Select and play parts of the media by highlighting the relevant parts of the text.
Share parts of the media creating URLs that contain start and end points.
Make our media more discoverable (via search engines)
Make our media more accessible.
More easily visualize the media.
Combine, embed and easily integrate media (using simple tools)
Mozilla’s approach was to expose a very comprehensive low level API, which potentially allows JavaScript developers to create all the functionality of Webkit’s Web Audio API and then some. As a result we get libraries like JSMad cropping up. What does JSMad do? Significantly, it allows you to play MP3s in Firefox*. Is JavaScript fast enough? Apparently so. This was a ‘this changes everything’ moment for me and since then a similar approach has been taken by pdf.js and more recently Broadway.js which decodes H.264 on the fly.
As zealous consumers know, the sleek look and user-friendly feel of Apple’s high-end gadgets are big part of their sticker price. One man is rethinking form and function with a tiny, inexpensive, bare-bones computer called the Raspberry Pi …which he hopes will bring the power of programming to even the poorest corners of the globe. Eben Upton is the creator of the miniature machine – he’s also founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation.
HTML5 has entered the online video market, which is both exciting and challenging for developers in the industry. With both the HTML5 specification and the various browser implementations in constant flux, we at LongTail Video spend a signficant amount of time understanding the limitations of the technology, testing playback across various browsers and devices, and optimizing our own products for HTML5 playback.