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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Online Videos Really May Go Open Source

Right now the vast majority of video content on the web is written in Flash, a proprietary format created by Adobe.

However, starting with Firefox 3.5, between the new HTML 5 + Vorbis + formats, flash-like videos can be created in a completely open source way. You don't need any proprietary codecs to watch these videos, just Firefox 3.5.

The Wikipedia and Daily Motion are converting over to this new format. Daily motion has 55 million users a month and 16000 new videos uploaded every day and the Wikipedia is used by almost everyone.

Furthermore, since one bedrock principle of open source is the ability to modify and redistribute content, Daily Motion will be able to do things with videos that can't be done if the video is in a proprietary format. They have a demo gallery showing this off.

If this becomes popular enough, and someone like YouTube follows suite, it could be the death nail to proprietary formats like flash.

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