HTML 5 video is coming, but which codec is going to be used to deliver it?

Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome have chosen on H.264, while Firefox and Opera are going for Ogg Theora. For us developers this sucks, because there is no one codec we can bet on to work in any browser. There's flash, which is more ubiquitous than any single browser, but it's a whole new toolchain to learn, and in my opinion it's a declining technology which will one day join the ranks of shockwave and <applet>. The future is in HTML, so what to do? Unfortunately there's no easy answer, so the most I can do is give an overview of what is going on today.

Choose multiple

First and foremost, keep in mind that the standard for the <video> tag allows multiple codes. You can easily specify a video tag with both an ogg vorbis and an H.264 source. This works as follows:

1. <video controls="true">
2. <source …

Peter Fenton’s open source investment tips. Boxee raises $6m. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

*451 CAOS Links will return on August 25*

Digesting the VMware-SpringSource deal
In the wake of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource the WSJ examined Peter Fenton’s open source investment portfolio and what he looks for in an open source vendor. Meanwhile Matt Asay noted that VMware’s purchase of SpringSource is the first big acquisition of a company based on an Apache license, while Charles Babcock reported …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Let me begin by saying “I am so not a gadget guy.” I don’t have an iPhone. Heck, I didn’t have a cellphone at all until April when I joined Percona as a consultant. I don’t ooh and aah over other people’s gadgets most of the time. I don’t have, you know, that kind of envy. I’m sure you see where this is going: I got a gadget and I think it’s really cool.

Anyway, my wife and I have a bunch of computers (desktops and laptops) and we had been feeling the pain for a long time: the files were only on one computer, and we wanted them available. I built a file server and then realized that it was going to be really expensive in terms of power alone, so I went back to USB drives for backups, and kept thinking about it.

After a long time I …

C.J. Blathers about recent major changes in his life.

https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/confidential/sateOfTheCJ20060625.ogg
https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/confidential/sateOfTheCJ20060625.mp3

Mail me for credentials.

For those of you who want to hear me read this instead of having to do so yourself (no hyperlinks), click here for .ogg and here for .mp3.

I migrated the blogs’ database and code from moonunit to avenger, both of which run Debian Sarge. Y’all should now notice a vast improvement in throughput. The ISP that Moonunit sits on should also see a large decrease in traffic.

Today, I added a campaign to raise funds for hosting. If you have any extra funds, please help me with colocation costs. It’s expensive and y’all use up a bunch of bandwidth. If you find this site …