HTML5 Audio objects

You don't need to bother with <audio> elements. HTML 5 lets you access Audio objects directly:

var snd = new Audio("file.wav"); // buffers automatically when created
snd.play();

There's no support for mixing in current version of the spec.

To play same sound multiple times, create multiple instances of the Audio object. You could also set snd.currentTime=0 on the object after it finishes playing.

Since the JS constructor doesn't support fallback <source> elements, you should use

(new Audio()).canPlayType("audio/ogg; codecs=vorbis")

to test whether the browser supports Ogg Vorbis.

If you're writing a game or a music app (more than just a player), you'll want to use more advanced Web Audio API, which is now supported by most browsers.

The MIME-type from your server for the fracWelDay3.ogv video is incorrectly being served as `text/plain'.

$ curl -I http://www.synergese.co.uk/testMathsOnline/day3/videos/fracWelDay3.ogv

Notice that Content-Type is text/plain instead of video/ogg:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 21:55:25 GMT
Server: LiteSpeed
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: close
ETag: "fa8cc4-4dde175c-0"
Last-Modified: Thu, 26 May 2011 09:03:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 16420036

The HTML5 video plays for me in Safari, Chrome and IE 9 but not Firefox or IE 7-8. If you fix the MIME-type issue, it will play in Firefox.

If you’re using the Apache web server or some derivative of Apache, you can use an AddType directive in your site-wide httpd.conf or in an .htaccess file in the directory where you store your video files. (If you use some other web server, consult your server’s documentation on how to set the Content-Type HTTP header for specific file types.)

AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

The first line is for videos in an Ogg container. The second line is for videos in an MPEG-4 container. The third is for WebM. Set it once and forget it. If you forget to set it, your videos will fail to play in some browsers, even though you included the MIME type in the type attribute in your HTML markup.