MediaFront has released an open source HTML5 video player with Flash fallback capabilities. The player can be used on standalone web pages or a CMS version is available for Drupal (with Joomla and WordPress offerings in the works). Because the player is open source, you may use it however you’d like at no cost and even modify the source code if you wish.
You can learn more and download the player by clicking here.
Of course HTML5 video is intended to do two things; provide a single web standard for video, so people using any computer or device can watch video without the need of plugins. After that, the purpose is to make it simpler (than Flash) for web content producers to publish their videos.
So far it hasn’t exactly reached either of those goals. In the case of making it simpler (than Flash) for web content producers to publish their videos, you can check out the installation instructions for the MediaFront HTML5 video player and determine for yourself if it’s simpler than pasting Flash embed code into a site.
As probably the biggest user of proprietary formats, Steve Jobs’ rant against Adobe’s Flash being only a ‘container’ for H.264 is about as big a piece of hypocrisy as you can imagine, but his point is justified in this case.
The flash ‘format’ for video has only become a web standard because Macromedia and then Adobe pushed for it to be so at a time when the alternatives – wmv, mov and RealMedia – were so dire for the purpose. Technology’s moved on since and the future is undoubtedly HTML5 and native format direct play but this open source option isn’t the answer, yet.
The only limitation now is browser implementation of the HTML5 format, but it will be universal by the end of the year. Who will really need Flash video then?