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Firefox 3.5 Preview Shows New Hope For Open Media Standards
The preview release of Firefox 3.5 is showing some neat tricks relating to online video, but not the kind that comes in a little proprietary bubble of Flash.
For example, the new Firefox 3.5 will be able to smoothly resize videos on the fly within the page. The interesting part, though, is that these videos are in OGG format – in other words, entirely open. With such a mainstream browser showing off what can be done with open video formats, there is a good chance that flash will lose its dominant position, or at least have to share a little. I’m not one to say “death to Flash” just because it happens to be proprietary, but an open video standard would allow for so much innovation. Already numerous projects are attempting to unify our media-watching experience. Just imagine the sudden freedom to create an even better experience if all that media was available in open formats.
Flash has been essential to the rise of sites like YouTube, but it might be time for something more flexible to replace it.
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Yes, Firefox 3.5 is getting the browser war to next level
At this point it seems quite interesting to move towards an open source framework, but I’m wondering whether it’ll really take off as part of the reason why videos went to flash was because of the already high acceptance rate of the plugin. It’s safer at this point to assume a user has flash, than to assume they have the latest version of browser that supports html5.
AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I hope that the firefox will help to boost video marketing..
some sites have already switch like daily motion
but they did it so the videos only work in ogg format with the video element when using a browser that support it
I had to change the user string from shretoko to firefox to make it work.
chromium for linux support the element but still dose not play the video I think they will fix it soon
can’t wait to see youtube make the same move
and
This is great to hear, but you can’t kick Flash off the throne when the latest Firefox (a browser that is still yet to de-throne Internet Explorer) is the only one to support this kind of technology natively.
And Manny, if Google come aboard and start giving videos out like that, Chrome and possibly Opera will follow suit, but IE will stick to Silverlight until the bitter end.
Perhaps Firefox needs to market itself like Silverlight does (go to http://www.asp.net/ and watch instant “popover” asking if you want to install Silverlight. Aggressive!
the only thing I worry about with OGG is that it still won’t be picked up as a format people will use. sure it is “open source”, but even the DL.TV podcast, a podcast for geeks by geeks, couldn’t get enough viewers downloading the OGG version to justify even putting that version of the show out.
in addition, more devices already support MPEG4 and H.264 encoded videos out of the box, such as the iPod, iPhone, Zune, XBox 360, (PS3?), PSP (to some weirdly encoded degree), some DVD and blueray players, etc.
The view right now is “support the format that can play on the most systems” rather than “support the free and open formats”, and honestly, I cannot blame that logic.
Just to be clear – flash video is not really “proprietary”. The Flash player supports “old school” flash ON2 video, but most sites now use … MP4 H264. People often confuse the scripted player engine with the media formats its supports. For example “flash audio” is and always has been MP3, well as AAC in more recent versions.
Nice, but YouTube is only supporting the patent encumbered H.264
Go to: http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/request.py?page=&contact_type=suggestion&master=suggestion&Action.Search=Continue
Then click ‘I have another idea’ at the bottom. A little text box will appear, into which you should enter something about H.264 being patent encumbered and it putting YouTube’s users into a dodgy legal situation. Be pleasant and argue the point well, you never know, they might listen to their customers.
@^
ajax is javascript
@manny – A few years? Try one year max. *older* browsers are already irrelevant. Firefox and Opera are cutting edge, and Safari and Chrome aren’t *that* far behind. And if something doesn’t work on IE(8), well… no one really cares.
Does this mean we can finally watch what we want without continuing to wait for Flash in a 64 bit browser?
the audio and video tags were blocked out of here…
actually,
older browsers could just get a flash substitute,
like how excanvas replaces the canvas tag with a vml substitute when IE is run.
user agents could solve the / problem.
@manny,
Your YouTube dreams may come true.
http://www.youtube.com/html5
“ajax + javascript + php + html5 + ogg/theora = win”
While I love open source, nothing scares innovative designers away like ‘Instead of working in flash, now you just need knowledge of several languages and every browser/OS combination’s quirks.’ The best experiences will still probably come via Flash because it’s a slow but forgiving black box.
very nice Demo
Am sure HTML5 will take off (specially if it’s included in all our FOSS CMS’s like wordpress, drupal, joomla, etc.)
ajax + javascript + php + html5 + ogg/theora = win
anyway i do prefer flash over silverlight anyday (am sure it will be harder for silverlight to take off now).
maybe google/youtube will help support more ogg (specially for their android OS), hopefully youtube (or other video sites) may become flash / OGG embeded hybrids webs
only problem i see is lack of support in older browsers (maybe we could get some patches/plugins for them.?..), but in a few years that shouldn’t be relevant
Tyler – Tell that to the thousands of web devs who spend twice as long making their code work in IE as actually writing their code.
ben – I disagree. As pointed out earler, Ajax is actually just a way of using Javascript. As for PHP and HTML (and actually Javascript, too), these are languages that almost every modern website makes use of. Yes, it will be a new version of HTML, but devs are going to have to learn it one way or another. Plus, all of these languages are fairly similar. I haven’t done much with Flash, but I believe that it is fairly different.