HTML5 and Adobe Redux

With the rise of HTML5, Adobe's Flash has been positioned as the antagonist of the open standard. Increasingly, HTML5 is used to serve online videos though the matter is far from resolved.

Adobe has just released an embeddable video player that plays HTML5 native video in browsers that support it, and falls back to Flash in browsers that don't. It's cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don't support Flash. Using Adobe's new player, these devices can show videos in web pages without the Flash plug-in. The shift takes place regardless of the screen -- from phone to monitor to TV.

This means that Adobe wasn't kidding when they said they were riding the HTML5 bandwagon as hard as anybody right now.

The HTML5 Video Player widget, now available through the Adobe Widget Browser, works with or without Dreamweaver CS5. Code generated from the widget plays video in the best possible player for the requested platform using a range of video codecs. Based on the Kaltura open source library, the HTML5 Video Player widget is fully cross-browser compatible with support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Moreover, the player is completely customizable with industry standard CSS techniques.

You can run the Adobe Widget Browser directly from within Dreamweaver and, once you’ve set it up, insert the generated code and files for the HTML5 Video Player widget with point-and-click simplicity. But if you’re not a Dreamweaver user, you can also download the Widget Browser independently. (You’ll need to install Adobe AIR first.)

Click here for links to several new tutorials on HTML5.

Click here for my post on the Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack