video object in html

Today, you need to use plugins and proprietary formats to view videos in browsers. There is great demand for a better solution to serve video content to users. A native video format in browsers without all the licensing and patent issues that plague other format could be beneficial to all parties (perhaps except those who make a living licensing expensive proprietary technologies for such purposes).

Some bits about the progress in this field are pasted together in this post.

The WHATWG (“Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group”.) is a growing community of people interested in evolving the Web. It focuses primarily on the development of HTML and APIs needed for Web applications. The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born. The W3C HTML working group and the WHATWG are working on the same specification, with the same editor.

The WHATWG is currently working on HTML 5, one of the feautures isa video tag for embedding video in html.
see for precise specifications on this:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video
The specs page includes the re;ark:

we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies.

Opera’s proposal is to use Ogg Theora, and has discussed this allready for a while with Mozilla. While there are certainly obstacles in the way (getting it all off the ground with proper cross-browser support and decent content), it might be possible if all or most major browsers support the format. Even browsers that may not support it could make use of plugins until they catch up.
Read more on this;
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2007/03/05/1

Chris Double is working on a patch for native support of the

The Javascript API for controlling video decoded natively by Firefox is available here in the WHATWG HTML5 specification. There is limited support for this API in the experimental builds of Firefox with Ogg video support – play, pause, currentTime, videoHeight and videoWidth.

Opera apparently support the efforts of the WHATWG group to have Ogg Theora/Vorbis support as a baseline in native browser support for the proposed

Thanks to Eric Gianquinto, Transmission and Engage Media.

Posted on: Thursday, December 13, 2007 by: in category: Collaborative filming, Copyrights and licenses, News