Interlude has released a new version of its HTML5-based video player that allows developers to utilize streaming video through HTML5 compliant browsers.
The platform integrates rich media including video, audio and motion graphics into interactive videos that play in both apps and mobile browsers. The company recently upgraded its video player from Flash to HTML5, allowing its videos to be embedded within any app or website for a consistent experience across mobile, tablet, and computer systems.
This is made possible on web as well as on mobile by a process called “dynamic video streaming,” which enables browsers to render video, audio, and animated graphics smoothly and on the fly. It is designed for HTML5 for rendering graphically-rich user interfaces, video, audio, and computer generated graphics in real time.
The platform helps mitigate two factors that have limited HTML5: 1) The wide range of hardware configurations available on the market, many of which are limited in their rendering capabilities, and 2) The high frame rate of video and graphics, which make rendering motion graphics on top of a video even harder within the browser.
While linear video files can be encoded to play in every browser through HTML5, with non-linear it could be challenging to offer immersive video experiences comprising of multiple video streams that are rendered smoothly by the browser without exhausting the device’s processor. The most common issues have been buffering, choppy animations, unsynced audio and UI elements that don’t move in sync with the video.
To solve the problem, Interlude changed the way it compresses, delivers and decodes video files, so that browsers are able to render non-linear, graphics-rich videos just as smoothly as linear videos. Interlude’s HTML5 player is programmed to fetch many different video files from the cloud in real time and deliver a single video stream on the fly based on the user’s behavior.
Interlude platform offloads the processing to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). By enabling the GPU to do the heavy processing, Interlude was able to reduce the CPU (Central Processing Unit) processing required by the browser to a minimum, so that no matter the device hardware’s limitations, its HTML5 player can still execute complex rendering on top of the video.
The result is a smoother viewing experience as video, audio and graphics transition from one narrative path to the next based on viewers’ inputs. No buffering, glitches or delays are experienced.
As part of the shift to HTML5, Interlude’s new version of its Treehouse tool includes a series of features that take advantage of the latest HTML5 technology. These new offerings not only allow the publishing of HTML5-based projects, but make use of recent HTML/CSS improvements to enable the ability to imagine and create a new range of interactions. New features include:
- A robust GUI (graphical user interface) overlay editor, providing a strong set of editing tools including smart arrange, align options, grid and additional benefits such as locking GUI elements or multi-selecting them.
- Ability to customize GUI for interactive videos using new style options that allow users to edit elements such as color, font, font size, line height, text align and other smart text functions.
Developers can utilize the ability to create new types of interactions using mobile features like compass, touch events such as swipe and pinch, tilting and microphone control.