Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.

Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer…  This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.

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Leading up to the w3c video meeting tomorrow there has been a flurry of activity on slashdot and elsewhere, focusing on nokia resistance to a key component of the html5 video spec stating that video tag “should support Ogg Theora”. This key piece of the html spec has been removed from the latest draft. With proprietary web beneficiaries recommending a codec agnostic approach to the html5 video tag they would have us all stop worrying and love the proprietary web. Fortunately a lot of us think otherwise. Here is a short essay responding to some of the arguments against having the w3c recommend the theora codec.

Update: Check out Xiph’s press release, Digital Citizen’s “who benefits” essay, bluish coders comments (the theora for ff developer), about baseline video codecs and html5 by ginger of annodex & finally: the html 5 wars and why you should avoid them by spread open media

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I hacked out a simple mediaWiki extension to use the mv_embed script. Its identical to the html based mv_embed except that description text is parsed as wiki text instead of html and it resolves file names for wiki video/image titles. This allows mediaWiki to easily include inline or external playlists. Having the playlist inline facilitates basic versioned sequence building. For now mod_annodex is need for segmentation, but I am working on a native php script that should allow easy integration of ogg segmentation wherever php is supported. Drag and drop sequences is also being working on in the metavid medaWiki extension but is still a few weeks away from public demoing. Watch for a screen capture post in the near future

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Given the many parallel projects to bring ogg theora into the many browser platforms it can easily get confusing. In this post I will give an update on the embed video projects that I have been following in the development of the latest mv_embed script. This script is a rewrite of the mv embed script with the intentions of bridging support for video tag from the html5 spec to non html5 browsers. Once the mv_embed script is included it goes through the page and rewrites all the html5 video tags with whatever playback method the client supports, letting web developers use the future html5 video tag today! See the sample page.
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