Posted on Tuesday, December 11 2007 @ 2:25 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Mozilla and Opera announced they will implement support for a new HTML tag in their browsers that will make it easier for publishers to incorporate video into their websites. The new tag will be similar to the IMG tag for photos and as long as the browser supports the video's specific codec or encoding method the browser will play the file without launching 3rd party software.
Opera and Mozilla officials say the changes to their browsers will offer a new level of ease for Web developers using open-source tools to embed and stream their video. If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser, everyday Internet surfers would not have the burden of downloading extra plug-ins for their browser to play the video.
Developers would not have to pay royalties to use the Ogg Theora codec, and open-source streaming media servers such as VLC or Icecast are free.
"With a baseline, royalty-free codec, end-users can produce and embed their own videos without having to pay any fees for the production of the video itself or the rights to stream it," Double said.
That could prove challenging to big vendors such as Adobe and Microsoft, who are betting big on demand for their own video and multimedia tools to feed the Internet's video boom.
It seems like a very nice idea but as long as Microsoft doesn't implement it into Internet Explorer I don't think the video HTML tag will take off.
