Mozilla's web revolution hits video

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 27 Jan 2009 at 10:30

Mozilla is taking on Flash and QuickTime with support for a video-streaming technology that aims to do away with proprietary plug-ins.

The foundation has announced that Firefox 3.1 will feature native support for the open-source Threora video format. Unlike Flash and QuickTime content which can't be viewed without plug-ins, Theora files can be embedded directly into web pages and played in any browser that supports the format.

To most companies, adding such support would warrant little more than a footnote on its newest features list, however Mozilla sees it as yet another step in the web revolution that's already knocked Microsoft back on its heels.

"Anyone can have an impact and anyone can affect the technology direction of the web, because anyone can build tools without permission ... There's one exception to this: video on the web," says Mozilla's director of evangelism Christopher Blizzard on his blog.

"Although videos are available via sites like YouTube, they don't share the same democratised characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed. And it shows. That centralisation has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video."

To overcome these "problems" and encourage further development of Threora, Mozilla has established a $100,000 research grant to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation.