Need to show the same video on your site to people on an iPad as well as Firefox 3.6, IE7? Want to support HTML5 Video but don’t know where to start with which browser supports which video format and how to detect properly? If so I’d suggest taking a look at the solution by Camen Design, Video for Everybody.
A quick summary is that Javascript writes in the player that their platform can handle starting with HTML5′s various formats and working it’s way to Flash. For example on an iPad it will swap over to H.264 but on Firefox 2 it’ll swap in the Flash Player.
Video for Everybody supports Flash (Your player or a default), OGG, MP4 and the newly announced WebM formats. More info here on compatability : http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
While I’m not a fan of treating Flash as the last player it tries to use as it arguably has the highest penetration of all the formats, this is a project that could become very important in the comming year. I’m already hearing clients ask for their Flash website to start working on the iPad as well – and while we all know there isn’t any simple way to do this, knowing the tools available such as Video for Everybody to produce alternatives will help greatly.
One last note is that the code is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, so just ensure to give credit in the code where credit’s due.
I’m always looking for alternatives as well, and if you favour any please list it in the comments of this post.
