The Silent Number

Posted: 2009-06-09


URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_JZ3WyjOTAFrom my YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSilentNumber
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HTML 5 supports embedding videos with a simple tag, and Firefox 3.5 adds support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis for video and audio, respectively (Midori already supports this as well). Dailymotion has taken advantage of this to create their new Open Video site where all of their users' content will be automatically transcoded into Ogg. They expect to have around 300,000 videos there and they have set up this demo site (requires Firefox 3.5 or Midori using the Firefox 3.5 user agent string) to show a few cool things that can be done without the constraints of Flash. YouTube has their own HTML 5 demo site but it does not (yet?) use Ogg, and since Theora is ahead of H.264 in objective quality, there really is no downside. I hope YouTube will follow in Dailymotion's footsteps, and it's very disappointing that they weren't the leaders here. This is a great direction for the futue of videos online, and YouTube could be a big boost for it. If only P2P streaming could have such significant developments. I'm sure it helps if you will join me in requesting Google uses Ogg for YouTube with HTML5 (Check off "I have another idea" at the bottom).

Update: The test showing that Theora is ahead of H.264 turned out to be flawed but Theora isn't far behind and is actually better than YouTube's videos (although HD was not tested).

Update 2: Theora has now been tested with HD videos and it equals what YouTube currently uses.