I'm very pleased to point out this announcement from the Mozilla project:
"Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and audio in its next release that includes support for the video element tag." [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492]
This is an announcement that Mozilla will be supporting the WhatWG HTML5 multimedia tags as well as including Xiph's unencumbered media codecs as part of Firefox.
The WHATWG HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags allow supporting browsers to naively display multimedia content just as they display still images: without the need for plugins or extensions and with full integration. Mozilla's commitment to including a set of reasonably performing and unencumbered codecs as a baseline means that web developers and users have an opportunity to have multimedia that Just Works without licensing obligations adding friction to the free flow of knowledge. Together the native multimedia support and the baseline inclusion of unencumbered multimedia codecs are an essential step forward in preserving the open and unrestricted qualities of the web which are so important to our mission.
The Wikimedia projects have long had a strong commitment to free media formats, and Wikimedia Commons is probably the largest repository of videos in Ogg Theora on the web. But our commitment has, at times, been a costly one: As an early adopter of free media technology we've suffered from more than our share of complications and incompatibilities. After years of effort driving adoption and our own work improving the state of the art for free media formats we're now seeing the beginnings of a true mainstream adoption which will allow these multimedia formats to be truly costless for producers and consumers of knowledge. I know from my own involvement that Wikimedia's adherence to free formats has been essential in moving things this far, and everyone who has worked on multimedia within the Wikimedia projects should be proud of our collective contribution here.
This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups developing and promoting these free codecs -- particularly Xiph.org, spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF's PlayOGG campaign. The W3C's policy of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free baseline codec set. Because of this, I'd like to personally extend thanks to the Mozilla Foundation for joining our leadership in this important area of web standards. Without their help Web Video would have no hope of escaping the environment of incompatible, proprietary, "de facto standards" with their related costs.
The Wikimedia projects have had integrated video playback support for some time now via the OggHandler extension. OggHandler supports a multitude of playback methods (such as a Java player using Cortado, and the VLC browser extension) in an effort to get unencumbered multimedia format support working for as many people as possible. OggHandler has been a great success, already working for a vast majority of readers, but the native support in a popular browser will make OggHandler even better (smoother performance, zero install or an easy upgrade to FireFox, etc).
The new <video/> tag in Firefox has been supported as a playback method in OggHandler since day zero so the new Firefox builds will automatically use their native playback ability on the Wikimedia sites.
The code for native support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis was checked into the Mozilla mainline last night and is already available in nightly builds marked 3.1a2pre or later [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/]. The support is new and pretty raw: There are obvious outstanding issues with things like timing and audio access on some platforms (such as many GNU/Linux distros). Once the known bugs are fixed I'll be soliciting Wikimedians to check for bugs in both our own player code as well as the Firefox test releases.
Now would be a good time to start building up some material on commons to showcase this support for Firefox's official release. Although we've had video on our projects for a long time it's still largely a new and unexplored territory for us. There are many opportunities to make important contributions and to have a lot of fun.
--Greg Maxwell