HTML5 video tag, Ogg Theora & H.264
About a month ago I went to a family memorial for my Aunt that passed. We had a ton of pictures and videos that I collected from everyone's cameras and I consolidated and made into CDs before we all went back home.
However, I've a very large family on my mother's side (she's got 12 bothers and sisters), and more than half didn't make it to the memorial. I wanted to put it all online to send links to all the family.
gThumb makes for some very easy web albums. I've used it dozens of times in the past.
But I also had a large video clip of my Aunt from a year before, plus videos clips from many of the aunts and uncles and a ton of cousins and many of our kids who visited at my uncle's house after the memorial. Over 700mb of videos in the original AVI FFmpeg format.
Video for Everyone is a great website with some succinct code for putting videos into the HTML5 <video> tag. It's great that the author of this code has come up with it, but it is so unfortunate that we can't have a standards-based way to play video in all browsers without having to have to come up with all sorts of hacks. Why it is that Apple and Microsoft can't support OGV at a minimum, and then use their own proprietary technologies/licensed methods as an optional "upgrade" for those who want to download extra plugins/steps? The whole point of the HTML5 <video> tag was to avoid having to have plugins and have something native that a browser could use.
Dive into HTML5 also has info on how to use the tag in Chapter 5 but even better is how to convert from many formats into Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio in OGV containers using ffmpeg2theora and H.264 video and AAC audio in MP4 containers using Handbrake
Each guide also mentions some Flash players to enable H.264 playback for browsers without any support other than Flash. Flowplayer has a GPL3 license available, as well as various Commercial licensing. JW Player is Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license which can also be purchased with a Commercial license.
So far, as I've just been using this for personal use, I've only tried the JW Player. I would like to get into the Flowplayer and use the GPL3 license to allow me to remove their logo from it and test it out in comparison to JW Player.
Ok, so if you'd like to see any example of what can be done, here is me chatting with my cousin about my journey from being a desktop/printer tech, to getting my Microsoft MCSE, then getting my Cisco CCNA, CCDA, CCNP, and CCDP certifications over 10 years ago. My aunts are very having a good time talking in the background, so you can't make out a lot of our talking.
There are some nice comparisons of Ogg Theora vs. H.264, and from an end-user point of view, they look very, very close.
If you checked out the comparison of Ogg Theora vs. H.264, you may want to see the full-length version of Big Buck Bunny, which was made with Blender, an OSS 3-D modeling program.
