This is part of our larger effort to bring open video to the web. We’ve been glad to work with NVIDIA and Youtube on this project building the solution entirely on open standards like WebM and HTML5. Our hope is that by lowering the barrier for 3D video on the web, we’ll see more interesting apps being build on open web technologies.

This feature requires that you have 3D Vision hardware. If you do have 3D Vision Hardware, go to youtube.com and search for ‘yt3d‘. Files encoded with 3D have this tag. You will also have to set your 3D mode for the type of hardware you have.

Even if you don’t have the hardware, trust me. This feature is pretty cool. I was able to load up some 3D trailers on youtube and it was pretty amazing to see a little world appear in the video box.

But this is my favorite, and it’s one that I think most people haven’t seen about wisdom, moral courage and leadership.

hey kids it’s a puppet show place coin in slot to make it go

See also.

“Someone has it backwards–it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary,” said spokeswoman Trudy Muller in a statement.

The snarky part of me thinks that this is two companies arguing about which level of hell they represent. (It’s still hell, guys!)

But the reasonable part of me wants to point out that one part of the Apple statement is worth looking at – the assertion that H.264 is open. Because I certainly don’t consider it to be – not even a little.

Standard? Sure. The specs are well known, it’s widely implemented and is for the most part interoperable. But I have a pretty specific definition of open, a word that is highly over-used and over-stretched. It’s basically this:

It’s open if I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to use it. Or ship it. Or improve on it.

Does H.264 pass this test? Nope. I have to pay someone before I can ship it in a product, even one of moderate success. It’s a sacred cow where the kind of innovation that we’ve seen on the web – a model from which Apple has benefited from like few others – just doesn’t happen. H.264 is locked up behind a glass wall, which you can look at and pay to enter, but it doesn’t have the fungible, open and distributed innovation quality that the rest of the web enjoys.

So standard? Sure. But not open. Huge difference.

If you want to learn more about these topics I’d also suggest that you read Stephen O’Grady’s post on Why I am against software patents and Brad Burnham’s take from a VC perspective: Software patents are the problem not the answer. They are also worth your time.

It’s a super-easy tool for Windows and Mac users that converts video files. Just drop a video file onto it, pick the device you want the file to be used for and click the “Convert!” button. Nothing else required.

It supports a pile of different devices (G1, iPhone, etc – they are all different) and also supports outputting Theora video as well.

This comes from the same guys who do Miro, another wonderful video tool that lets you browse and subscribe to various video podcasts.

Anyway, it’s great to have a tool that makes this problem much easier for a lot of people. Great stuff!