Hypertext markup language (HTML) flourished and helped create the robust Web because it was vendor neutral. When you put an image the Web with HTML, it doesn’t matter how you created the image, provided you output the image in a standard format, that is recognized by HTML. These formats, jpg, gif and now ping, are included as part of the export or save functions in any modern image editing, paint, or draw program.

Open video is an idea that aims at creating the same kind of neutrality toward applications and vendors for video that exists for images. A consortium is working on an open, free video app as an alternative to Flash, a proprietary Adobe app. While the Flash player is free, the application to create video that plays within a page of HTML, is not.

The issues range from general support of open solutions, to discussions of how many potential video makers, especially those outside the US, do not have access to Flash. There are also issues of the size and processing power needed by Flash to display its videos. Many mobile phones do not display Flash videos for this reason.

VLC is an open source video codec that is available now. It works well, though since it is new, some servers do not yet recognize its mime-type. That means, if you download VLC and make a video with it, you’ll see how it works on your machine, but it might not load on another server where the VLC mime-type hasn’t been set up. This used to happen with Flash all the time, and as Flash was used more and more for video, most servers were updated to recognize its mime-type. This will happen with VLC, too.

The idea isn’t to block Flash out necessarily, but for apps that create video to include the option to output the video in open formats like VLC, in addition to the proprietary .swf format, for example. This is from Ars Technica, read the whole article

“Mozilla has crafted some compelling demos to show how the HTML 5 video element can be used in innovative ways with other Web standards. When we looked at Firefox’s first steps towards implementing the HTML 5 video element in 2007, we linked to a demo in which video is natively rendered on SVG elements that can be interactively rotated, moved, and resized within a page while the videos are playing.

The more recent demonstrations are even more impressive. At the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in February, Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard showed how to use JavaScript worker threads to programmatically detect and highlight motion in video as it is playing. The HTML 5 features required to implement these demos will all be available in the upcoming Firefox 3.5 release. This can all be done with real JavaScript—no browser plugins or third-party programming languages are required.”