One area of web video baffles people more than any other; how to prepare a video for the web and then get that video on their web site.
First you need software that will encode your video in a web-ready format (Flash, QuickTime or WMV), then you need a player for your video and cryptic embed code that makes everything work together on a web page. And this process is so confusing, that most people just turn to video sharing sites where everything is done for you.
A few months back, Mozilla decided there should be a single, simple, accessible format for web video and began supporting something known as Ogg Theora.
What is Ogg Theora? It’s open-source code for creating audio and video files. Ogg is the audio part and Theora is the video part. Together they are attempting to become the standard for web video.
Being thrown into the mix is the latest (but still in development) version of HTML…HTML 5. This version of HTML will support video tags (i.e. <video>). And with it, you can add videos to your web site as easily as you add images (no crazy embed code required).
The end result…or idea…is that anyone can quickly encode web ready videos with no special knowledge, then instantly add those videos to their sites, while the viewers need no plugins whatsoever to watch the videos.
Unfortunately, none of this is going to happen any time soon. First there is the Ogg Theora issue. It’s being designed to produce videos at MP4 quality. Problem is, that quality hasn’t been achieved yet. On top of that, there is no simple user interface available for people to encode their videos with it. You pretty much need to be a code warrior to even use it. And then we have competing browsers, with only one providing built-in support for it…Firefox…while other like Chrome and Safari prefer the H.264 video format.
Next, we have the big 3 video formats already on the web…Flash from Adobe, QuickTime from Apple and Windows Media/Silverlight from Microsoft. These guys and their video formats are fimly entrenced on the Internet and they aren’t going to go away anytime soon (if ever).
So what could the Ogg Theora developments really mean for online video? Well, at this point and in the near future, not a whole lot. While all the technical mumbo-jumbo (or lack thereof with Ogg Theora) makes for good daydreams, the reality of online video comes down to this.
People want dead-simple ways to get their videos online. They want to click a button and be done. And viewers want a dead-simple viewing experience. They want to click a button and watch a video. This is exactly why video sharing sites are so popular…they provide both experiences.
And with Ogg Theora, people are not getting that. At least not yet. And until they do, they’ll stick with what already works.
But in the meantime, if you’d like to see an Ogg Theora video in action, just click here. Of course, you’ll need Firefox 3.5 installed to view it (tip: that’s a hoop you don’t want your viewers to have to jump through).
A couple of corrections to your blog post….
Ogg is not the “audio part”. Ogg is a container format that is relatively unrelated to either the video or the audio. Vorbis is the open source audio codec typically used in an Ogg container, and Theora is the video codec used in an Ogg container. There are other codecs that Ogg will eventually support, the most notable being BBC’s open source Dirac.
Similarly, MP4 is a container format that usually holds either H.264 (video codec) or AAC (audio codec) amongst others.
Also, regarding: “You pretty much need to be a code warrior to even use it.” It doesn’t take much of a code warrior to put into a page.
It’s also interesting to note that all of the other “big 3” video players you mentioned are or will soon be supporting H.264. Flash can already play H.264 MP4 files, as can Quicktime. H.264 support is also being built into Windows 7. H.264 is also built into Bluray, iPhone, ZuneHD, Tivo, etc., and Youtube has the majority (if not all) of their content already encoded into H.264 (how do you think that Youtube videos play on hardware devices such as the iPhone and Tivo).
Because of this, for browsers that support H.264 in their implementation (Safari, Chrome), you can embed the SAME mp4 file in the tag, and as a fallback easily load it into a Flash player for users of Internet Explorer. If you were to embed Theora, you’d either have to encode the video in two formats or load the video into the browser through a Java applet as fallback. Neither of those sound very appealing.
There comes the rub: Theora may be approaching the same ballpark when it comes to quality and it may be free, but how do you compete with superior quality and the ubiquity of H.264? H.264 IS already the standard… it’s just unfortunate that it must be licensed.
ah, it stripped out my pseudo-tag as HTML. “It doesn’t take much of a code warrior to put into a page.” becomes “It doesn’t take much of a code warrior to put [video src="myvideo.ogv" controls] into a page.”
And, “you can embed the SAME mp4 file in the tag” becomes “you can embed the SAME mp4 file in the VIDEO tag”