Firefox and Opera lead the web video way
I downloaded Firefox 3.1 beta 2 (after trialling other development snapshots over the last few months) to see Ogg Theora video support is coming on really well. Opera, as well as Mozilla has committed to including this royalty-free video codec for web use. This is really good news; as one Opera Developer said:
Something however is still not quite there about web video. The video solutions mentioned above are proprietary closed solutions that rely on plugins to display in a web page - what we need to make video a first-class web citizen is an easy, open solution to integrate video into web pages, and native support for video in browsers.
In short, we need a
< video >
element in HTML, and we must also agree on a baseline video format that will be universally supported, just like the GIF, JPEG and PNG image formats are universally supported for images. It’s important that the video format we choose can be supported by a wide range of devices and that it’s royalty-free (RF). RF is a well-established principle for W3C standards. The Ogg Theora format is a promising candidate, which has been chosen by Wikipedia.
So all that basically means that video should be a first class citizen
of the web like images. For too long has it been wrapped up in Flash and
Silverlight. They could still wrap ogg theora and degrade nicely if no
plugin for their format is detected (dependent on Adobe and Microsoft
which is unlikely). Anyhoo enough of all this text; how about some nice
video?!?
Theora decoder not found