Playing cached audio for offline use on iOS Safari has long been a challenge that has proved to be mission impossible. But with the advent of the WebKit-only, it is now finally achievable — although you still need to jump through a few hoops.

While I was researching HTML5 multimedia-related topics for my book, HTML5 Multimedia: Develop and Design, I noticed a number people struggling to get HTML5 audio and video working in different scenarios. From Twitter to Stack Overflow, the same questions kept cropping up, so I’ve put together a list of the most common problems (and some not so common) and their solutions (if there is one!).

Guest doctor Mark Boas returns with a follow up to his 2009 article Native Audio in the Browser, which covers the basics of HTML5 audio. Read the original if you want to get a feel for the <audio> element and associated API. If not, get comfortable and dive deep to learn about the current state of play for HTML5 audio.

HTML5 (or now, the WebRTC spec) gives us getUserMedia, a way for JavaScript to access streams from a device’s camera and microphone. Find out how to use it and normalise the syntax differences between Opera and Chrome with the gUMshield.

We’ve been able to play video in the browser without a plugin for a couple of years now, and whilst there are still some codec annoyances, things appear to have settled down on the video front. The next step is adding resources to the video to make it more accessible and provide more options to the viewer.

This is a bit of a special Simplequiz this week. Simon Pieters, who works on multimedia QA for Opera and is one of those working on the HTML5 spec, asked us to run a quiz that would help the spec writers decide on a new aspect of the language.

There are a couple of interesting developments in the world of HTML5 multimedia that you’ll be interested in—the webM video format, and a proposed solution to HTML5 multimedia accessibility.