Video Breakthroughs

HTML5 video and audio tags were designed to make embedding a video as easy as embedding an image. They were also designed to give users a faster experience by doing away with browser plugins such as Adobe Flash.

Unfortunately, older browsers don't support HTML5 video and audio tags, and even modern browsers don't support a consistent set of video codecs, making embedding a video rather difficult.

The html5media project makes embedding video or audio as easy as it was meant to be. It's a fire-and-forget solution, and doesn't require installing any files on your server. Unlike many other HTML5 video players, it allows people to use the video controls supplied by their own web browser. It's one of the smallest, fastest solutions available, and as browser technology improves it will become even faster.

The html5media project is open source and can be found on GitHub.

Creators that want to build interactive video applications have largely been constrained by the lack of easy-to-use tools for doing so. Today those publishers can either use rudimentary tools like YouTube annotations to extend an element of choice to video applications, or they can turn to expensive, custom web design firms to build that interactivity into their videos.

Now one startup is looking to provide an alternative: Boulder, Colo.–based Flixmaster offers a platform for publishers like transmedia creators and interactive advertisers that provides most of the functionality that they desire, without requiring them to shell out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to build custom experiences.

Starting with Firefox 4, WebM videos encoded with 3D data will be displayed in high-quality stereoscopic 3D using NVIDIA 3D Vision hardware. 3D hardware has moved from movie theaters and into people’s homes through TVs, laptop and desktop machines. 3D video games are in wide use today. And consumer hardware that’s capable of capturing 3D photos and videos is starting to come onto the market. In fact, there are several thousand 3D videos available today on Youtube. And starting today Youtube will transcode and play these videos into the open WebM format with 3D for use with their HTML5 player. This feature is currently only available with Firefox 4.