The open video alliance has put up a wonderful little video up that tries to talk about all of the issues around open video and why it’s important. It’s based on Interviews that were done at the recent Open Video Conference.
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Earlier this week, Automattic, the company behind wordpress.com and WordPress (the software this weblog runs on) announced that they would be supporting Theora along with MPEG-4 as part of their VideoPress platform.
It’s important to realize that wordpress.com is the second top 20 website in the US to add support for Theora. (The other is Wikipedia. DailyMotion has also been experimenting with Theora – number 13 in France and 38th world-wide.) These technologies are still new, but it’s nice to see that people are adopting open standards and open formats as early as possible.
Along with some web site adoption, really great tools are starting to come together to support Theora in HTML5, making it super-easy to transcode videos into open formats.
It’s great to see so much progress in such a short period of time.
I’ve included a link below to the video that describes VideoPress in an open video format hosted at wordpress.com, along with with MPEG-4 and flash fallbacks.
One Cloud? by liberato
This really wonderful post by Anil Dash echos a lot of what I’ve been talking about in the context of the larger web. I had a discussion with Ben Galbraith recently about this topic during a Mozilla lunch. He and I took (intentionally) different positions on topics to see what kind of discussion we could stimulate around how developers see the web platform.
Ben has some concern that the web platform isn’t as coherent as those that you find from the other big players – the iPhone platform, Silverlight, Java or any of the other giant siloed stacks. (Actually Ben was more interested in the capabilities of those platforms vs. the web, but I’ll talk about that later.) I’m basically of the opinion that the web that we have, and as messy as it seems, actually produces pretty good results. That the incrementalism and experimentation that we’ve seen from web browser vendors results in what I call “developer-friendly incompatibility.” That those changes are eventually codified to standards and taken mainstream because they degrade well and we can learn as we go. (Kind of like life!)
But it does raise an interesting question – what capabilities do we need to have for the web that are found in these stacks? And can they be applied in an incremental fashion? We’re starting to see that with video being promoted as a first class citizen with Flash as a trailing edge fallback. We’re starting to see the web pick up 3D capabilities with participation from Google, Apple and Mozilla. And we have the pretty wonderful library model that has produced jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, YUI, dojo and many others – all of which come from pushing complexity to the edges of the web community.
But is it enough? Discuss. What’s missing, and what’s interesting? I would particularly love to hear from Java and Silverlight developers. What do you really love about those platforms? Is source-as-delivery and incrementalism enough?
[ See Vlad's post on this topic, Arun's post in the Mozilla standards blog and the official Mozilla blog post. ]
Today Mozilla and the Khronos group announced that Mozilla will be leading an initiative to bring accelerated 3D to the web. This is a pretty big deal for us and for the web, and is really a reflection of the continued acceleration of open web technology well beyond just the classic HTML and JavaScript that we’ve seen in the past. It’s our intention to include this as base functionality in the release after Firefox 3.5, assuming all goes well on the standards front.
We’ve started to see more and more libraries being built to support use cases with Canvas in a 2D context but we really want to take things to the next level and start to allow people to use 3D capabilities as well. Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open web technologies. 3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table.
The proposed spec (found in one of vlad’s post on 3D Canvas) is a pretty light wrapper on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, with some changes to support some JavaScript pleasantries. OpenGL ES is a decent starting point, which is why we picked it. OpenGL is supported as part of every major operating system and in it’s being picked up as a standard on mobile devices as well. Compared to the full OpenGL spec, the ES variant is a smaller subset that reflects the reality of what’s being used on the ground and most hardware and software vendors have actually been re-tooling to support OpenGL ES with support for older versions of full OpenGL emulated on top of OpenGL ES. Mixed with the fact that there’s a decent amount of knowledge out there in the industry of how to use OpenGL, we think that this smooths the integration between the current set of OpenGL users and larger web developer community.
Expect to see some releases of the code to start with in the form of the Canvas3D extension. Vlad has made releases of it in the past and we’ll be able to have something that works as an extension as part of Firefox 3.5 for people to start experimenting with.
Chris Double posted about this but I thought it might be worth it to put together a simple video screencast of what this actually looked like in practice. It’s a damn neat idea and opens up all kinds of possibilities. Once again, with video as a first class citizen on the web, what can people dream up?
Some of you might have noticed that I was able to use a fallback in my previous posts that include a native video tag. I was going to do a post on how that works. It’s pretty simple.
But Chris Double beat me to the punch and has an excellent little tutorial about how he’s using the video tag with elegant fallbacks. (In his post you can use something other than the Java-based fallback. In my case I linked back to vimeo.)
Enjoy!
A lot of people read blogs on open source projects via their respective planets. For example, I’m on both planet.mozilla.org and planet.gnome.org. You can either read content directly using your browser or you can read the rss feed for the entire planet. In either case the planet software parses and re-exports the feeds in order to enforce some level of html correctness and remove html items that might be unsafe.
For a long time people have been embedding flash movies in their posts using both <object> and <embed> tags. However the planet software, rightfully so, strips those tags out as unsafe.
Native video support, however, is designed such that it’s safe to include video in html and more recent versions of feedparser support passing video elements through to the planet software. Here’s what one of my recent posts looks like on Mozilla’s planet site:
One problem is that the controls don’t show up. If you’re using <video> and you want the controls to show up you have to add a controls attribute to the video element, like so:
<video src="foo.ogv" controls="true"></video>feedparser was stripping out the controls attribute. (In Firefox if you right click on the video you can still play it manually.)
However, Sam Ruby was nice enough to fix that problem in feedparser. Admins for the various planets should probably update their feedparser versions to pick up this fix to get ready for the new video-enabled world.
Thanks, Sam!
I’ve made a screencast to describe some of the new video capabilities and how they can interact with the rest of the open web technologies we’re building into Firefox 3.1. Although I’ve embedded it below with a video tag (with a fallback to vimeo) I strongly suggest that you view the full sized version in either OGG Theora format or Quicktime H.264 for maximum clarity. It’s als up on vimeo.
You can find more information about using video and audio and web workers (threads) on developer.mozilla.org. Also I suggest that you follow the web-tech blog if you want to find out new features as they are added to Firefox. Enjoy!
Update on February 24th, 2009: Due to popular demand I’ve made a screencast of the two demos that I used in this presentation.
I’ve put up slides from my talk at SCALE 2009. Lots of people were interested in the slides. There’s the .pdf I’ve linked to above and the original .odp format. It covers most of the interesting new technical features that we’re going to include in Firefox 3.1.
Here are two relevant links from the talk:
Enjoy!
Become a Friend of Gnome!
Watch as I Grow
interesting stuff
- On 1:1s :: dria.org March 10, 2010
- Streaming Media - Ogg, MPEG LA, and Submarine Patents March 9, 2010
- Opera Core Concerns - Everything you need to know about HTML5 video and audio March 4, 2010
- PdaNet -- USB Tether/Bluetooth DUN for Android March 2, 2010
- html5media - Project Hosting on Google Code March 1, 2010