dailymotion and open video

May 27, 2009 in Daily Motion, Firefox, Freedom, OGG, Open Web, Video | 33 comments

Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5.  They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats.  You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

I’d like to personally thank the wonderful people at Dailymotion, along with Paul and Tristan who helped bring this project to the point where it is today.  Dailymotion has been an excellent test case for us because they haven’t just encoded with the formats that we support but also built a full-fledged player using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that looks, feels and acts like the flash-based players we see on the web today.  They also make it possible to embed open video using an clever <object> tag that loads the video content safely in an HTML page.

Standing on the twin pillars of the HTML5 video API and royalty-free codecs, the movement to bring open video to the web is well underway. Dailymotion, along with Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have all committed to start serving up open video.  The free encoders are getting better and better over time and we’re starting to see more interest in the technologies.

Dailymotion, Mozilla and a large number of other partners will be at the Open Video Conference on June 19th and 20th.  If you’re interested in talking with us you might want to come down to the conference and learn what’s happening with video on the web.

  1. John (J5) Palmieri’s avatar

    John (J5) Palmieri on May 27, 2009 at 5:24 pm

    geterdone!!!! Don’t you love it when the cards just fall into place.

  4. Michael Kozakewich’s avatar

    Michael Kozakewich on May 27, 2009 at 11:44 pm

    Ooh! I was looking for a javascript video player. I’m excited.

    Was it you who posted about that encoder a few weeks ago? How do Ogg Theora and Vorbis measure up to the other video codecs we see today?

  5. corey’s avatar

    corey on May 27, 2009 at 11:55 pm

    don’t forget youtube
    http://www.youtube.com/html5

  6. Name (required)’s avatar

    Name (required) on May 28, 2009 at 1:35 am

    Does the fullscreen mode require user input? Because otherwise we will have fullscreen open video po(rn)p-ups ;)

  7. Benoit’s avatar

    Benoit on May 28, 2009 at 1:46 am

    corey: AFAICT, the YouTube demo is _not_ Open Video. The file is in MPEG4, a proprietary format.

  9. Nick’s avatar

    Nick on May 28, 2009 at 3:40 am

    Wow, just downloaded it to try it and I’m extremely impressed with it. Well done and thankyou for making the web a better place!

  10. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on May 28, 2009 at 8:23 am

    @corey, the youtube stuff uses a similar API, which is great, but they are doing their encoding with the mpeg4 codec + container, which means that it’s proprietary.

    @Name, we don’t have a fullscreen mode at the moment. Maybe in a later release.

  11. MauricioC’s avatar

    MauricioC on May 28, 2009 at 10:34 am

    The first time I tried the Open Video Demo, I had the following problems:

    1) You can’t just press play to see the buffered content. Combined with the fact that the buffer size is really large sometimes (I don’t know why), this makes for a really bad experience.
    2) Volume controls don’t work, or at least don’t give any visual indication that they do work, while the video is buffering.
    3) Seeking doesn’t seem to work when the video is getting buffered, either (and by that, I mean that it doesn’t work sometimes, and I guess this is because the video was buffering). This is another deal-breaker: Video sites that don’t support seeking while buffering are useless in slow connections.

    The SVG filters are pretty slow, too, but I guess they’re going to get optimized in a later release of Firefox.

    Even though these quirks really look bad, the idea is really good. Keep it up!

  12. Mayel’s avatar

    Mayel on May 28, 2009 at 10:49 am

    This is a great initiative !

    What’s missing is full-screen mode. I hope FF will implement it…

    Fullscreen (but within the browser window) is possible using JS, here are some bookmarklets :
    http://lelab.tv/player/js_fullscreen.htm

  13. Evan’s avatar

    Evan on May 28, 2009 at 11:38 am

    @Mayel, perhaps the fullscreen in the browser could be combined with a key listener for F11. Then F11 could become the standard keystroke for “fullscreen this video”.

    Evan

  16. Russ’s avatar

    Russ on June 3, 2009 at 1:17 pm

    I don’t know what all the commotion is, you can do the same thing using the element in HTML 4 or XHTML.

  17. Russ’s avatar

    Russ on June 3, 2009 at 1:19 pm

    The above should have read: “using the “OBJECT” element in . . .”

  27. Sem’s avatar

    Sem on July 22, 2009 at 11:00 pm

    I have a Mac Mini, 1 Ghz CPU, 512 Mo RAM, and Firefox 3.5 plays those videos very slowly, making them unviewable.

    With mplayer I can play any kind of videos, even DVDs, at normal speed with no problem. But the videos on openvideo.dailymotion.com, even with a small definition, won’t play normally.

    Does the problem belong to Firefox or am I doing something wrong ?

  28. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on July 23, 2009 at 5:23 pm

    Interesting – I had no such problems on my mini. PPC or Intel?

  29. Sem’s avatar

    Sem on July 23, 2009 at 9:14 pm

    PPC. When I download the video with wget and play it with mplayer, it plays very smoothly.

  30. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on July 24, 2009 at 9:46 am

    We’re generally a little slower than some of the players out there because we go through the web’s rendering infrastucture – i.e. being able to clip it through HTML, SVG, etc. We’re working on improving that performance so you’ll have to see in a later version if it’s going to be fast enough or not.

  31. Sem’s avatar

    Sem on July 24, 2009 at 10:42 am

    Thank you for your reply. I’ll stick to wget & mplayer for now.

  32. alex’s avatar

    alex on August 21, 2009 at 6:34 pm

    Sorry to be downer. But it don’t work in Firefox 3.5 Their demo video played once for me and that is the end of it. Non-functional after then. There was no sound and no full screen. Windows XP machine and all that. As a roll out it is reminiscent of Ubuntu including a non functional Network Manager for their netbook remix

  33. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on August 21, 2009 at 6:44 pm

    Weird! It does seem to be working just fine here.