Firefox 3.5 brings native open video support

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Congralutations are in order for our friends and comrades-in-arms at Mozilla: they’ve released version 3.5 of their open-source Firefox browser today.
Aside from major improvements to speed and memory usage, one of the updates that has got us most excited at Wikimedia is the support for HTML 5’s native <video> and <audio> elements.
What does this mean? Well in short, it means that Firefox 3.5 is the best browser to run video and audio clips from Wikimedia Commons on!
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A few months more down the line, we’ll start being able to integrate support for our inline video sequencer, which’ll make it easy to extract snippets of a longer video and combine them — entirely using open-source, non-patent-encumbered web standards. This makes heavy use of the new HTML 5 multimedia support; while at first editing will be limited to Firefox 3.5 users, other browsers are continuing to improve and adopt the same support.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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The only thing that’s negative in the firefox player or generally the open video is the inability to run the videos in Full screen. I don’t know why that’s not possible.
The most important feature that would be great is subtitles. Is it possible to have subtitles in open videos? Changeable subtitles not embedded into the video file.
Anyway, great news hope it moves video on Commons forward.

There’s not currently native subtitle support per se yet, but it’s possible to overlay timed text to implement them that way. I’m certainly hoping that’s something we can work out and integrate!

And the thing with no Full screen is to be implemented by Firefox and not Wikimedia right? I mean is it an HTML5 problem, Firefox problem or Wikimedia problem?

Yes, that’s on Mozilla’s end: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453063