Announced today, Adobe HTML5 Video Player Widget, based on the Kaltura HTML5 Media Library.
The main reason why HTML5 is raised in every session or workshop on web video lately is due to mobile devices that don’t support Adobe Flash (*cough* iOS). Alas, whenever HTML5 is presented as the “standard-compliant-preferred” solution for doing cross-device video playback it raises many eyebrows, and rightfully so – some claim thatHTML5 isn’t ready yet for production websites. At least not on its own. And further, most mobile devices don’t support the freshlynot-yet-fully-spec’d standard.
So we’re left with a hybrid solution: HTML5 (mostly for iOS), Flash (desktop browsers & Android, Future Blackberry) and a link to specially encoded video files (in cases of older mobile phones).
This feels kind of awkward. As a web developer, you will now need to:
- Encode your videos in various formats making the video ready for each browser/device
- Detect the browser/device and version of the user client
- Decide on the playback mechanism that is right for that user client.
To take away this headache (and a few others), we came up with the Kaltura HTML5 Media Library –www.html5video.org, which includes an open source, cross browser, cross device, “fallback” player.
Today, the Adobe Web Frameworks team is introducing a newHTML5 Video Player Widget built on a subset of the Kaltura library. It’s a light-weight Flash & HTML5 hybrid solution for video playback across different browsers and devices. Download it through the theAdobe Dreamweaver Widget Browser.
The HTML player UI is built using jQueryUI, packaged from the Widget Browser, and then customized and integrated into your website using Dreamweaver or any other HTML editor of your choice. This lets web developers focus on their main goal, developing the website rather than overcoming quirks of web video playback compatibility.
Continues @http://blog.kaltura.org