The
Palm
Civet

sleek html5 video player. eagerly looking forward to firefox and ie flash fallback support.

videoize is a simple jQuery plugin that i wrote for easily creating html 5 video tags for capable browsers, with a fallback option for either flash or quicktime. videoize is a stand alone plugin that includes a minified version of the excellent jQuery SWFObject plugin for embedding flash objects.

to call videoize, simply include the jQuery file and in your $(document).ready function call. videoize comes with the following options and override-able defaults =>

$("#videoize").videoize({
	// location of the mp4 video file
	mp4: "", 
	// location of the ogv file for firefox
	ogg: "",
	// location of the flash video player
	flashplayer: "player.swf",
	// location of video poster image
	poster: "",
	// video height
	height: "480",
	// video width
	width: 	"720",
	// autoplay video
	autoplay: false,
	// show video controls
	controls: true,
	// if set to true, the fallback player will be quicktime, not flash
	quicktime: false
});

open-source, mega wow-factor audio/video player run on javascript and flash. its used on such cool sites are muxtape, soundcloud, and noxiousfoxes.com and is completely styleable through javascript and css. make sure to check out the 360º demo.

auto_html is a time-saving rails plugin i stumbled upon for turning a link into a desired chunk of code. for example, i’m using it on cotmf.com to take a link to a youtube or vimeo video and turn it into the <object>/<embed> code i need at a specified size.

say you have an attribute of :video for a model of Post. add a column of video_html to the ‘posts’ table in your database, and include the following in your model =>

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    auto_html_for :video do
      youtube :width => 400, :height => 250
      vimeo :width => 400, :height => 250
    end
end

then, you just need to call <%= @post.video_html %> in your view file.

auto_html comes with a handful of built-in filters for links, images, and video, and you can also roll your own.

with the release of firefox 3.5, the exciting reality of html5 <video> is really ramping up. kroc camen has his eyes right on this ball of change by putting together a test page that takes advantage of html5 browsers by using their built in video control capabilities, but also gracefully falls back to a flash player solution for the non-hip ones.

if you are unfamiliar with firefox’s .ogv format as i was, gruber pointed out a simple command line tool for osx called ffmpeg2theora.

update: taylan pince created a simple gui wrapper for ffmpeg2theora called oggifier for those who would rather not type in the commands. the best part is it taps into the sparkle framework for automatic updates.

{via}

the future is finally coming for modern day browsers - video embedded in html (no flash/quicktime player needed), with css styling. check it out in safari 4 or webkit.

{via}

a really code-dense and descriptive article on how to make scalable, embedded flash video containers. thanks to thierry for doing all the hairy research and ie5.5 and ie6 hacking so we don’t have to.