Dailymotion adopts open-source video format

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 3 Jun 2009 at 10:38

Dailymotion has teamed up with Mozilla to launch a version of its site that doesn't require Adobe's Flash plug-in to play videos.

The site supports the HTML 5 video tag for playback, making it the first major video-sharing site that doesn't require some form of plug-in to play the videos.

HTML 5 is currently in draft form, though most major browsers offer at least partial support for it. The video tag is one of a raft of innovations found in the spec and allows developers to embed video on their sites using standard web technologies such as CSS and JavaScript.

The site has been optimised for Firefox 3.5, which features support for the open-source Ogg, Theora and Vorbis video formats being employed by the site. However, the videos should work on the majority of browsers.

Dailymotion is currently re-encoding its user-submitted videos and expects to make around 300,000 available in the open-source formats. However, the company admits the quality of the videos encoded on these formats "is not yet as good as other common codecs such as H264, ON2 VP6" but claims that because of their open-source nature, they'll "improve quickly".

It was a view echoed by Mozilla, which claims the development of open-source video formats was vital to the future of the web: "Video is a vital part of the online experience. At Mozilla, we view the support of open, non-proprietary video standards as key to the overall health of the web," says Paul Kim, VP of Marketing, Mozilla.

"Dailymotion's strong support for open video helps move the web forward."