I admit I haven’t really looked into the video tags at all on HTML 5 standards, so it was a nice surprise to see that they included the multiple format support. It’s still going to be a painful process to provide files in all those compression standards.
Video is made so much easier right now by using flash or silverlight plugins, since you provide it in one format, and the user is expected to have the player installed, or they’ll be directed to get it.

There are some big problems with Silverlight compatibility in browsers other than IE. (For example, look at the Alan Wake site at xbox.com/alanwake, and take a look and the bright falls videos – My chrome browser could not manage to get them to play, so I had to load up IE to get it to work… The videos suck, by the way).

That’s why HTML 5 video tags should be better. But unless they make it easier for the content provider to distribute video, it’s not the best solution. Selecting a range of video compression standards and having all browsers support them all would be nice… Not holding my breath, though.

Ah… yeah. Anyway, the Modernizr JS library is the sort of “hack” I was referring to. I would have clarified more if I had more time, but we’re pretty busy at work at the moment.

-Mike

I’m gonna have to go dig up a pair of those glasses to check this out.

I wouldn’t have believed you if I hadn’t seen it on there myself (April 1st and all).

Nice find.