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html5
![5 best HTML5 video players for your website/blog [Internet-tools]](http://www.techexplorer.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/image4.png "5 best HTML5 video players for your website/blog [Internet-tools]")
HTML5 will sooner or later replace flash. This is quite evident from the latest upward trend in the popularity of HTML5 and the fact that most of the web browsers are not supporting HTML5 multimedia. Even popular video hosting sites have shown their positive support to HTML5 video formats and hence it’s inevitable for webmasters to consider HTML5 as a very strong option while integrating audio and video on websites and blogs.
To make your task a breeze, here are some very good HTML5 video players that can be integrated onto a website or a blog that can not even play HTML5 audio/video files but also traditional formats.
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1) Video JS: Video JS is by far my favorite HTML5 player so putting it on top of the list. It is a Javascript based video player that fully utilizes the power of HTML5 in latest web-browsers like Firefox 4, Chrome 5 and Opera 10.60
2) JW Player: The close second is the JW Player. What I really like about JW Player is that it gives comparatively more personalization options. So there is hardly a chance that the player won’t go well with your blog/website’s theme.
3) Kaltura: An open-source video solution that works on all major browsers and yes, it even works on Internet Explorer. It is a skinnable and can be a decent HTML5 video player.
4) OSM Player: Open Standard media player is a jQuery based HTML5 video player that’s versatile and can play even the traditional video formats. It can additionally deliver videos from YouTube and Vimeo.
5) Video for everybody: Most simplest of them all. This isn’t actually a video player but merely a piece of code that your browser (HTML5 compatible browser, ofcourse) understands and fires up the native player to play the content. You need to embed your video under a <video> element, like so:
<video height="360" width="640" src="LINK TO THE HTML5 VIDEO FILE" controls="controls">Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video.</video>
I am sure there might be many more options available optimised for different platforms like WordPress, Joomla, etc. If you know of any or have developed a player of your own, do mention it in the comments.
Seems like Microsoft doesn’t want to mess up on anything with IE9 by making it as much compliant with the web standards. After CSS3 and HTML5, it’s VP8 to get Microsoft’s support. And this really matters because Internet Explorer has a significant user base and IE9 is going to be huge. For those who don’t know, VP8 is a highly efficient video compression technology, developed by On2 Technologies (now owned by Google).
WindowsTeamBlog confirmed today that IE9 will support VP8 video along with H.264. It read,
…we want to be clear about our intent to support the same markup in the open and interoperable web. We are strongly committed to making sure that in IE9 you can safely view all types of content in all widely used formats. When it comes to video and HTML5, we’re all in. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.
Do notice the clause- ‘when the user has installed VP8 codec’. This means that VP8 support will not be out-of-the-box. However, what matters is the support for an evolving web technology. It surely goes without saying that IE9 will hence support WebM. For WebM, this is the time to rejoice as it has two giants, Google and Microsoft, on it’s side. We have covered a post on WebM where you can also find the download links to the nightly builds of major browsers supporting WebM.
Google’s largest developer event, Google I/O, is being held at San Fran, California where Google just unleashed a third alternative for video in HTML5 – WebM. It is an open, royalty-free web media file format which aims to become the default standard for web videos.
The dilemma with the original two competitors for HTML5 video, namely Ogg Theora and H.264 was that Theora is open source and royalty free but a really low quality codec. While on the other hand, H.264 is better than Theora but is licenced to an entity called MPEG-LA which might not be acceptable to the big daddies.
Google introduced WebM and broke the decision deadlock. WebM incorporates the goodness of both. The video codec is based on VP8 by On2 (FYI: Theora is based on VP3) and the audio on Vorbis. A subset of Matroska media container will be used as a container for the audio and the video.
What’s more exciting is that Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Adobe and even Internet Explorer 9 will support WebM. In fact, the nightly builds of aforementioned browsers are already supporting WebM and are available for download.
Mozilla Firefox builds supporting WebM:
Download for Windows / 12.3MB
Download for Mac / 25MB
Download for Linux (Intel) / 11MB
Download for Linux (64-Bit Intel) / 12MB
Opera builds supporting WebM:
For Windows-
For Mac-
For Linux-
Google Chrome builds supporting WebM:
The Chromium blog reported that the dev channel build of Google Chrome supporting WebM will be out in few weeks. So stay tuned!
For Linux-
Now Ubuntu users can try Chromium’s latest build power-packed with WebM support.
Download Chromium latest Build for Ubuntu
With mighty Google at its side, backed by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WebM sure looks like the future of web videos. But are we missing someone special here? Yes. Apple. And Apple is fiercely in love with H.264. My guess is that we are going to witness yet another war of the codecs; WebM, backed by Google and Microsoft and H.264, allied with Apple. This is going to be interesting. Very. Interesting.
