HTML VIDEO OPEN STANDARD GOOGLE MOVING TOWARDS VP8 (ON2)

Concerns about patents and licensing have prevented some browsers from supporting H.264; this in turn has prevented the HTML5 spec from requiring support for a standard format. We believe the web needs an open video format option. One that not only helps address the licensing concerns, but is also optimized for the unique attributes of serving video on the web. To that end, we’re excited about the new WebM project. Google is open sourcing and contributing the VP8 codec to the WebM effort. Google, Mozilla, and Opera have all committed to support WebM, and we have already started making YouTube videos available in the WebM format. Adobe has also committed to support VP8, the video codec for WebM, in an upcoming Flash Player release.

Full article here:
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

Tons of html 5 video sample are available at http://oggtv.com/ mostly ogg

You’ll probably already have read up on and experimented with the new HTML5 video element, which allows us to include video inside an HTML page without the need for plugins (if not, read our Introduction to HTML5 video before going any further.) You’ll probably also be aware that there is somewhat of a disagreement over codecs going on. Opera and Firefox currently support the Ogg Theora video codec, while Safari supports the H.264 codec. Google Chrome supports both, while Microsoft have announced support for H.264 in IE9. This is not ideal, as to implement a cross-browser video with HTML5 you would need to encode and reference multiple video formats. For example:



Enter WebM
Help is just around the corner — Google has released the VP8 video codec and WebM container format under royalty-free terms, with the aim of making a high quality, open video format available across different browsers and platforms. This was announced publicly at the 2010 Google I/O conference. Opera has created an experimental WebM-enabled build, which you can play with today.

Windows:
Windows standard installer
Windows classic installer

Mac:
Mac universal binary
Mac intel package

Linux:
Linux 32-bit
Linux 64-bit


It is clear that Adobe now needs to integrate webm support in Flash Player and FLash Media Server ASAP.

How:

by providing the user the ability to decide on various fallback

If your browser supports it, HTML5 video is used.
If HTML5 video is not supported, Adobe Flash is used.
Finally, if all else fails, a placeholder image is shown
This is all done without JavaScript and requires only two video encodes, one OGG file, and one MP4 file.

It’s compatible with HTML 4, HTML5 (valid markup), XHTML 1 and additionally also works when served as application/xhtml+xml



http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

Ensure your server is using the correct mime-types. Firefox will not play the OGG video if the mime-type is wrong. Place these lines in your .htaccess file to send the correct mime-types to browsers
AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Now I am wondering how Microsoft is going to handle ism file format and how non microsoft browser are going to respond. The fallback mecanism should work with IE9 and support ism file format.