Thursday, May 28th, 2009
A good day for Open Video. A long way to go!
Category: Video
What are the odds? At roughly the same time we saw the top two user generated video sites on the Web show us a glimpse at the future:
At Google I/O, Vic showed us an HTML 5 demo of YouTube. It looks the same, but the controls are in HTML, powering the video tag. The related videos on the right hand side had a cool new feature. As you mouse over them, they would play along. Right now seeking around in video is an awful experience. With larger pipes we will be able to do iMovie style flip-throughs to find exactly what they are looking for in a video.
DailyMotion goes a step further. They announced not only a demo area but “a new R&D platform dedicated to open video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com“. You can find 300k videos all encoded in open formats right now.
Firefox has lead the way with Ogg Theora support, but as Mark Pilgrim noted Chromium can be built with support. The question as Mark says is “Will Chrome support Theora video?!”
Let’s not kid ourselves, piranhas are out there in the murky waters, so it is a balsy move for anyone to do this, especially folks with lots of $ to go after…. but we need to blast open the doors. Here’s to the march of Open Video.
Which browser did they use for the demo? I just tried with FF 3.5b4 on WinXP and I only get black video windows and JavaScript errors.
Finally, Dailymotion is still using Flash to show the videos on their openvideo site.
It works well on Safari 4 beta :)
yeah.. video was a bit blurry though
Johoooo…!!!!! :D:D:D:D:D
The demo was built in Safari 4 Beta. You can try it in other browsers given that it should be pretty standards compliant, but no guarantees. Code for HTML5 is being checked in to all of the OSS browsers at a pretty rapid rate. Safari (and the Webkit nightlies) simply happened to have the most complete set of features on the day we started building the demo. That may or may not have changed by now.
To clarify, I am talking about the YouTube demo with which people are having a hard time seeing in other browsers.
It works great with FF 3.5b (Mac).
What’s missing is full-screen mode. I hope FF will implement it…
Fullscreen (but within the browser window) is possible using JS, here are some bookmarklets :
http://lelab.tv/player/js_fullscreen.htm
So, Google, will Chrome support Theora video? When?
@mayel — that’s a cool “full screen” trick, but You Tube (or Flash) full screen takes up the entire screen, not just the browser windows as this one does. A big difference. Here’s the mozilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453063