As Steve Jobs once said: “We are going to make history today.”

Dailymotion is excited to launch a new R&D platform dedicated to open video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com. You don’t need the Adobe Flash plugin to watch videos on this platform – the only requirement is the latest version of Firefox, 3.5 beta, available here.

No plugins? No Flash?
Nope – for all content from Motionmakers and Official Users we are using the new HTML tag, supported by Firefox 3.5, to display the video, and not any proprietary technology.

But wait – the video quality is lower and sound is sometimes crackly…
That’s normal…for now. The new encoding formats we’re using are Ogg, Theora + Vorbis. They’re not yet as good as other common codecs such as H264, ON2 VP6, but they comprise an open format that is not patented, is free to use, and is supported by the Mozilla foundation (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/01/26/mozilla-and-wikimedia-join-forces-to-support-open-video/). So don’t worry – it’s going to improve soon. We have a few tricks to improve the quality, but for the moment re-encoding 300,000 videos in this format forced us to compromise.

Why does non-Flash video playback matter?
It’s both technical and philosophical, but to make long story short, it will allow us to do new, fun things with video. Some examples are on our demo page. Ultimately, we expect this to enable innovation in user experience, SEO, advertising, etc. For more on the value of open video, read the article here.

Why do you call this”making history”?
Because:
- HTML received a major upgrade from version 4 to 5
- The new HTML lets you display video simply with the use of a tag
- Dailymotion is the first large video sharing site to participate in and promote open video formats

Do other browsers support this HTML tag?
Yes, but our code works best on Firefox 3.5 beta and is not yet optimized for other browsers. We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.

For now, the video player is simpler than our Flash-based player. But we are going to improve it little by little. Stay tuned for more.

Enjoy!

PS: Come see us talk about open video at the Open Video Conference in New York, June 19-20!