Technorama

A lot of websites do rely on the Adobe Flash Plugin to provide Video playback. Fortunately now that isn't necessary as we have the Theora codec. Theora is a completely free codec, no costly MPEG-LA patent licenses, or even software licences, it is all free, it's also available at no-cost online -- which is all great! As I've noted before, availability is worthless if it is not accessible, so distributing videos in Theora content is the future ;)

So skip the harmful tags (embed and object) that youTube try get you to use, display an frame of your video, with a play icon instead. Make it an onclick= action, to change the play icon colour. Then make that link to the Theora Ogg file. Something like Amazon are doing:
Install the codecs now, and be part of the future: Mac QuickTime, Windows DirectShow, Windows command line.

Example ffmpeg2theora command-line:

$ ffmpeg2theora -a 8 - v 8 my_input_video.mp4 --title "Documentary title" -o output_video_theora.ogg

It's a shame people like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig are still shoring up Adobe's proprietary Flash format by embedding in into their otherwise open web pages. At least when I pointed out that EFF was shoring up the proprietary WMV format, they fixed it..

A few other links on this topic, w3c video consultation, and the why video tag won't work (apparently!).

Labels: Theora