HTML5 Video Player for All Browsers

by Stephen Fluin 2010.03.03

I'm a huge fan of HTML5 video, and I feel that Flash as a video player is horrible. As a part of increasing the adoption of HTML5 and Ogg/Theora specifically, Google has released a code project that does automatic browser detection and failover so that content producers can simply use the HTML5 version of the video, and include a piece of javascript so that in browsers where HTML5 is not supported, the legacy (and broken in my opinion) flash player will be subsituted.

In order for this to work, insert the following code somewhere in your system:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://html5media.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/jquery.html5media.min.js"></script>

If everything works as advertised, you should see the video below:

Update

It appears that this solution doesn't work in Internet Explorer 6, as it appears the flowplayer doesn't support Ogg Theora, which stops this solution from being cure-all, and this plugin doesn't help the cause of open formats as much as I would hope.
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