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Panel at the Open Video Conference (photo by ekai: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekai/3642506635)

The other week I went to the Open Video Conference in NYC. Here’s a round-up of what’s going on right now with open video on the web.

There are a lot of exciting things happening right now with with the evolution of open video standards on the web. A short while ago, the news came out that the next version of Firefox, Firefox 3.5, will support the new <video> and <audio> tags - which are part of the new HTML 5 standard. These new tags will make adding video to a web page as simple as adding an image. It will also allow users to watch video on the web without any Flash at all (players can be built with HTML/CSS/JS). And in a perfect open video storm, the open source Ogg/Theora codec is finally at a point where it can begin to compete with proprietary codecs (see stills here). In addition to this, Mozilla awarded Wikimedia Foundation a $100,000 grant to support the coordination of the development of Ogg Theora.

Why is open video important?

Video currently lags way behind text and other less-rich media on the web in terms of openness, interoperability, findability, and indexing (and creation, but that’s another can of worms). The web is a central part of most people’s daily lives and experience of culture. It’s how we get our news, information and entertainment. So it’s important for it to be as open as possible. Openness helps drive innovation, and it also lowers costs by not having to pay royalties to bodies such as MPEG-LA (internet use is currently royalty-free, but that may change in 2011). Using FOSS (Free and Open Source) products also drives innovation, as engineers can tweak things for their purposes, and give back to the development community of the FOSS products by adding to the codebase.

(Note: To properly view the demos below, you should install Firefox 3.5 beta. If you want to do this but not overwrite your existing install of FF, use the free MultiFireFox app by local developer Dave Martorana)

At the end of May, Dailymotion launched a new R&D platform using these new standards, making it the “…first large video sharing site to participate in and promote open video formats.” Like Dailymotion mentions, these new standards will enable new user experiences along with innovations in SEO and video advertising. Some of this can be seen on Dailymotion’s demo open video page, where you can manipulate both the player and the video itself, on the fly. Another cool thing you’ll be able to do with HTML5 is link to specific parts of a video (both temporally and spatially).

Currently only FF 3.5 supports the Ogg Theora codec natively. The Xiph plugin is available to enable Safari to support Ogg, as well as enable viewing and export of Ogg from the QuickTime Player (gets added to your QT Components Library). So while these open codecs are not ready for prime time yet due to both quality and support issues, the seeds have definitely been planted for browser support to grow.

Another open codec called Dirac is being developed by the BBC in conjunction with the open source community. The Dirac codec can be integrated into many common containers such as transport streams, .ogg, .avi and .mp4. You can download Schrodinger, a x-platform implementation of the Dirac codec.

In addition to open video codecs, FOSS video editing programs are also being developed. Unfortunately, they all only run on Linux at the moment. But they are still definitely worth checking out:

• Cinelerra
• Lumiera (an offshoot of Cinelerra)
• PiTiVi
• Blender (a 3D animation app that could also be used for editing, can run on Mac OSX and Windows)

Some Awesome Demos and Further Reading: (best viewed in FF 3.5)

• Video For Everybody (by UK developer Kroc Camen)
• HTML5 validation with video fallbacks (by videoblogger Michael Verdi)
• HTML5 video demos (by Paul Rouget, Mozilla tech evangelist from Paris)
• Connecting HTML5 Video to the Web (screencast by Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism at Mozilla)

Have some more demo links? Add them in the comments. And if you’re interested in helping create open video standards, check out the Open Video Alliance.

PS - Thanks to everyone who presented and spoke at the conference - this post couldn’t have happened without you.