The DVD-Video specification created by the DVD forum has proven to be a very robust and consumer friendly method for delivering high quality interactive multimedia content to consumers. Since the release of DVDs in 1997, they have enjoyed one of the fastest consumer adoption rates of any consumer electronics device in history. Since 2007, however, DVD production has entered a period of decline. The decline in popularity of DVDs is viewed by many as being related to a decline in popularity of physical media and an increased demand for the electronic delivery of interactive content. Indeed, many consumer electronics devices are now designed to receive content via a network connection instead of or in addition to via physical media and many services offer electronic sell-through of content for viewing via such consumer electronics devices.
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) standard specified by the World Wide Web Consortium specifies a markup language that can be used to control the rendering of web pages. HTML pages are written in the form of HTML elements including tags. HTML5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard that adds many new syntactical features. These include the <video>, <audio>, and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics content. The new features of HTML5 are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs. Many new consumer electronic devices, both as set top boxes and mobile devices, are moving to support some or all of the HTML5 specification.
A Document Object Model (DOM) is a convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML documents. Aspects of the DOM (such as its elements) may be addressed and manipulated using DOM scripting. DOM scripting refers to programmatically accessing a DOM using a scripting language. In the context of HTML5, the scripting language utilized for DOM scripting is typically JavaScript licensed by Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, Calif. JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and can be used to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites by providing programmatic access to the DOM of a HTML5 page.
Web browsers rely on rendering engines to parse HTML into a DOM and based upon the DOM and DOM scripting the rendering engine formats content for display. The <video> element was introduced by HTML5 to enable the display of videos, without the use of additionally installed plug-ins. Using any number of <source> elements, the browser can choose automatically which file to download or the JavaScript canPlay( ) function can be used to determine which file to download. By specifying the Internet media type (also referred to as a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions type or MIME type), the web browser can determine whether it can decode a specific video file by querying its multimedia framework for third party codecs. The current HTML5 draft specification does not specify which video formats browsers should support.