Google has just showed their support for the HTML feature that shows videos on websites without Adobe Flash Player. The <video> tag is supported in Google Chrome 3.0.182.2, a developer version currently in the works.
The <video> tag is part of the HTML 5 standard, that Google fully supports in their effort to make the web applications compete with the ones in our PCs. Unfortunately, the HTML 5 standard isn’t yet ready, so there are much more features to come, including for videos.
There already are versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari that support the <video> tag, but none of them is officially released, due to the beta phase of HTML 5. Embedding videos on your website will be much better than with today’s technologies ( Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight ), being able to overlay text boxes, images and even other videos on a video.
HTML 5 faces some problems though, caused especially by the browsers support and users that rarely upgrade their browsers, so it will take long since it’s official release until at least a big part of us will make profit out of it. Another issue is the technology used by the browsers to encode and decode the video. Firefox supports the Ogg Theora format for video and Ogg Vorbis format for audio, while Chrome will support H.264 and Ogg Theora for video, AAC and Ogg Vorbis for audio, according to Google’s Matthew Papakipos.
