2011/2/10 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
OCW wants a failproof way to instruct people to set up their browsers so that our media player works. Of the MIT staff who tried it, 3 of 10 had problems until they installed another browser or fiddled around.(!)
Use Flash video. *ducks*
The state of open video support is still pretty sad. As great as Google's embrace of WebM will be in the long run, right now it means fragmented support for two different open formats. Firefox plays Theora out of the box (although there are still some ugly bugs that won't be fixed until FF4), Chrome has nominal support for Theora but for me it's been broken for a long time, and I've heard the same from others. IE is IE, they're just starting to support that crazy SVG thing in IE9. For video, they're betting on proprietary H264 for now - no surprises there.
There's hope that Adobe will support WebM in Flash which would give us wide WebM platform coverage. But, we don't even support WebM uploads yet, let alone transcoding. The only full-time resource we have working on this stuff is Michael Dale -- we've been lobbying Google to help with MediaWiki support, we'll see whether that comes to something.
The best you can do for now is recommend people install Firefox (you may want to use the beta for the best experience).