[Laszlo-dev] HTML5 video by Youtube and Vimeo...

[Raju Bitter]

On Jan 22, 2010, at 1:35 PM, P T Withington wrote:

> On 2010-01-22, at 06:25, Raju Bitter wrote:
> 
>> Did you see the announcement of HTML5 video for Youtube and Vimeo?
>> http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/introducing-youtube-html5-supported.html
>>> A while ago, YouTube launched a simple demo of an HTML5-based video player. Recently, we published a blog post on
>>> our pre-spring cleaning effort and your number one request was that YouTube do more with HTML5. Today, we're
>>> introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player.
>> 
>> 
>> http://vimeo.com/blog:268
>>> What's the HTML5 player, you ask? Simply put, it's an alternative to our current Flash player that looks and works
>>> almost exactly the same way. What are the benefits?
>>>  The player loads right away -- no more spinning butterfly thingy
>>>  You can jump anywhere in the video, without having to wait for it to buffer
>>>  Smoother, less jumpy playback (we hope)
>>> ....
>>> It only works for about 25% of you: you must be running the latest versions of Safari, Chrome, or IE with Chrome Frame installed.
>> 
>> Hmmm, probably time to tackle an OpenLaszlo version:
>> http://jira.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-8290
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> It's funny.  Apple gave u-toob a great incentive to re-encode their videos as H.264.  If you use the click-to-flash plug-in, somehow it tells u-toob to deliver the H.264 if it is available.  I guess it pretends to be an iphone?  But then it just uses quicktime as the player.  I'm not sure I understand what it means to have an "html 5" player.  There are html buttons that control the playback?  Is there more?

In light of Google's acquisition of On2 technology - there was just a press announcement by Google an On2 on Jan 7th (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100107005821&newsLang=en) this can be seen as a the next step on the way to an open web video platform.
http://technologizer.com/2009/08/05/google-acquisition-could-move-html-5-ahead/
> “Today video is an essential part of the Web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, in a prepared statement. “We are committed to innovation in video quality on the Web, and we believe that On2’s team and technology will help us further that goal.”

At the same time, just today, Firefox announced fullscreen support for open standards based HTML 5 video: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/10/firefox-3-6-gets-full-screen-native-video/
> Firefox 3.6 now supports fullscreen video playback through native HTML5 video embeds. Just right-click a video embedded using the HTML5 video tag and you’ll see a new menu item for full-screen playback.

And they have support for poster view:
<video src="videofile.ogg" autoplay poster="posterimage.jpg">  
  Your browser does not support the <code>video</code> element.  
 </video>

So much happening... but still not one open standard!