For some time I’ve thought about open video support in OpenLaszlo. Since Mozilla and Wikimedia announced that they join forces to implement open video in January 2009, that idea has crossed my mind several times. France’s leading video site Daily Motion has built an example website supporting the HTML 5 video tag at openvideo.dailymotion.com (you need Firefox 3.5 for testing), and it looks very cool. Here’s some more information on the HTML 5 based video support in Firefox 3.5.
The W3C states in the draft for the HTML 5 standard, that
Implementations are free to implement support for video codecs either natively, or using platform-specific APIs, or using plugins: this specification does not specify how codecs are to be implemented.
Google has announced to support Ogg and Vorbis codecs, as CNet.com reported in May:
Google has begun supporting a new HTML feature to show video in its Chrome browser as an alternative to Adobe Systems’ much more widely used Flash, but the technology overall remains rough around the edges.
The support comes in Chrome 3.0.182.2, a developer preview version that on Wednesday inaugurated work on the 3.0 generation of the Google browser. HTML video is one of a handful of technologies in the still unfinalized HTML 5 standard that Google hopes will transform the Web from a collection of relatively static sites to a foundation for full-blown applications that rival those on PCs.
OpenLaszlo as one of the leading open source RIA platforms should – in my opinion – implement open video support for both DHTML/Ajax and the Flash/SWFx runtime – starting with DHTML/Ajax. For anyone in the community interested in supporting such an effort, feel free to join the discussion in the OpenLaszlo JIRA – where I created an issue for this feature. I’d be happy to work on that feature, given there’s enough interest in it.
