Mark said it on Friday: We absolutely adore HTML5, and the prospect of delivering great-quality, speedy video directly in your browser without using Flash has us thinking unpure thoughts here at 23. (There are plenty of reasons why we’re not quite there yet. I won’t dive into the details, but if you want me to drag you in to that vortex, just ask…)
We’ve actually used HTML <video> for a while in the mobile version of 23 Video, but today we’re beginning to test wider adoption of the possibilities. To do this testing, we’ve enabled HTML5 video on a few sites including Reboot and Madbio. In practice this means that you will be able to play video in most modern browsers and mobile devices even if there’s no Flash installed — this includes Safari, Google Chrome and the iPad.
We’ll be beta testing these new features for a few weeks before rolling it out to all customers — but if you want iPad and HTML5 video support now, drop us a mail or ping us on Twitter.
So you’re not using Ogg Theora I suppose? :)
Yeah, given the penetration of Flash amongst Firefox users and the relative quality and browser support of Theora, it’s really hard to justify the work and disk space needed to get HTML5
I’m a Firefox dude myself so this is a tough choice; but I’m hoping for a change in Mozilla policy (given how they feel about gif, zip, flash and java over there).
Well, Gif’s patents have expired, not sure about Zip but Flash and Java are only supported through (third-party) plug-ins, so that wouldn’t really be a reason for a change in policy.
It’s a sad situation, really. Too bad Apple rejects Theora…
Well, the gif license hadn’t expired when it was originally used (http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/gif_h264_patents) — and all the mentioned formats/plugins are used within Firefox under at certain set of conditions. They’re certainly not license-free, which seems to be the requirement for its choice of video codec. I’m not arguing that gif/zip shouldn’t be used; only that there’s a murky and not-clear-cut past even for Mozilla or Firefox as free software.
The larger issue is quality. First, some have argued that Ogg and Theora are inferior formats (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292, http://ffmpeg.org/~mru/hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/), and, secondly, general lack of hardware support makes Theora a very, very dark horse indeed.
Apple certainly has plenty of reasons to reject Theora — if for no other reason that the nice h.264 hardware decoders on their iGeräts.
[...] geeky stuff we’re working on for 23 Video. Here I am talking about some of the challenges of purely browser-based video playback (and of course, how we’ll solve that in an awesome and timely [...]
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