Google, Mozilla and Opera develop open source video codec
Google, Mozilla and Opera have joined foreces in a new high-quality, open video format that could end the ongoing debate about the video support in HTML 5: the WebM Project.
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Facebook videos switch to HTML5
Facebook has begun switching some of its videos to HTML 5, allowing playback on Apple and other mobile devices.
Video for Everybody!
As the author explains, Video for Everybody! is simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5
, so it can be used on every website and even on RSS Readers or mobile devices like the iPhone. Visit the site to start playing with the code.<video> element, falling back to QuickTime and Flash automatically
Sublime: HTML5 video player
SublimeVideo is a great looking HTML 5 video player that allows video embedding without the need of browser plugins (of course your visitors will need a modern browser). The player is just a “pre-release demo” for now, but most of its features are already working. You can check the demo and read more in the developer’s blog.
YouTube introduces HTML5 powered videos
YouTube announced today that they are introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported video player.
The player has some limitations: It doesn’t support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and only works in browsers that support both the video tag and h.264 encoding (Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer using ChromeFrame).
To try it out, go to the HTML5 page via TestTube or visit this page and join the HTML5 Beta.
Watch YouTube videos without Flash in HTML5
Sometimes there’s no way for me to watch Youtube videos on Ubuntu. And I have a few problems on Windows too. Flash can give you a lot of headaches, most of the times because CPU usage or crashes. Fortunately the Neosmart guys created a solution to watch Youtube videos taking advantage of the video support in HTML 5.
OOVJ
The status of the video tag
The video element colud allow us to include a video or movie without the need of a plugin such as Adobe Flash, which seems to be the de facto standard nowadays. But one of the main problems for a massive implementation is the lack of an agreement for a common video codec on all browsers.
The two most popular candidates seem to be Ogg Theora (open source) and H.264 (proprietary) but…
- Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora because of the lack of hardware support and patent issues.
- Google implemented both options in Chrome but, due to licensing issues, cannot allow the use of the H.264 codec to third-party applications and stated that they believe
Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.
- Opera won’t implement H.264 because of the license costs.
- Mozilla stands in the same place as Opera, due to the costs to downstream distributors.
- Microsoft has not yet commented about the issue.
So, what could be the future of the video implementation? Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, sees to possible solutions:
1. Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple’s concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web.
2. The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.
It seems that, for now, there’s no chance for a standard solution. For the time being, we can see some beta implementations of the video tag in sites like Dailymotion or Youtube, each with their own approach to the subject.