Kaltura Helps To Spread The Word About HTML5

Hot hot hot on the heels of the IE9 HTML 5/H.264 news is an announcement from Kaltura that they're teaming up with some others to start some new open video initiatives, specifically in regards to HTML 5

A partnership with Wikimedia Foundation and Open Video Alliance sees two initiatives to further promote an HTML 5 open video standard. Kaltura already has an HTML 5 video solution with a fallback so that those without an HTML 5-capable browser can still get their video content. The new video players will also have some new management options, analytics and monetization. More info on that can be found at www.html5video.org.

The Kaltura Open Source Online Video Platform will have a full HTML 5 video library meaning that you will be able to utilize it straightaway. It's currently being tested by Wikipedia and thanks to the fallback everyone can still see the content. It includes a robust video player that can be customized, skinned and has a plugin architecture so you can expand upon it. The media library also includes an audio player, media uploader tool and online video editor.  Learn more and download the library: http://www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5/

The second initiative is  the website HTML5Video.org which aims to spread the word about all things HTML 5 video and help raise awareness. Hopefully this will help sort out the whole codec debacle, yes, at this point I feel it's a debacle. They've also got a great set of demos including the code so you can see what they did to get the video on the page - http://www.html5video.org./demos/ I like it so much that I might try to move GDN over to Kaltura's video player this weekend. The ability to skin and monetize is important and right now I've all but given up on OpenX and their video ad server. The site will also have industry news and resources, an invitation to the community to get involved and more.

"The world needs an open video standard which allows everyone to produce and share video, without licensing fees or browser plugins," said Erik Möller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "HTML5 offers such a standard, and we've partnered with Kaltura to develop an open source HTML5 video solution for Wikipedia. We encourage you to check it out, and to support open standards in your web applications.”

The demos also include Dailymotion, YouTube, Vimeo and Sublime. A lot of the demos are Firefox only... I guess we know who they're throwing their support to. The full browser window option is pretty cool actually. The videos load fairly fast and the player isn't as CPU and RAM intensive as Flash sometimes is. Right now Firefox is using 15-20% of the CPU and about 250MB though admittedly I do have 4 tabs open including ReelSEO, Gmail and the video playing in a tab I'm not looking at and have been surfing for awhile. Closing the tab with the video playing dropped CPU usage to 2% and RAM to 230MB (so about 20MB difference).