Well with my works recently on a new web based player for the radio station that detects the visitors web browser and directs them to a suitable play head, I decided I could probably expand this with the HTML5 <audio> tag as a player.
Seems like a good idea but the real issue is browser support and codecs.
Apple Safari & Internet Explorer 9 will apparently support MP3 & AAC. My testing couldn’t get it to work with either, when streaming from Icecast.
Opera & Firefox support OGG & WAV codecs only due to licensing reasons. Just recently we killed off our OGG stream because nobody listened to it. So essentially with our MP3 & AAC streams we can’t support Firefox in HTML5 and instead must use Adobe Flash.
Google Chrome supports AAC, MP3, OGG & WAV codecs. My testing revealed that it worked fantastic. However I couldn’t get it working with AAC+ and only MP3.
So after testing a few browsers the only one I could get HTML5 audio working when streaming from Icecast was Google Chrome.
I’ll still implement a HTML5 audio player anyway, but I’ll only send users of Google Chrome to it. It seems the compatibility in other browsers is lacking.